DOGE Cuts Pull AmeriCorps Volunteers Off of Disaster Relief Jobs
AmeriCorps, the US federal agency that oversees volunteerism and service work, abruptly pulled teams of young people out of a variety of community service projects across the country on Tuesday. The work stoppage was due to cuts attributed to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, volunteers were informed Tuesday afternoon.
WIRED spoke with seven workers with the National Civilian Community Corps, better known as AmeriCorps NCCC, who say that they were told to stop working on projects ranging from rebuilding homes destroyed in storms, to readying a summer camp for kids, to distributing supplies for hurricane recovery, and prepare to immediately travel back to their homes.
Aadharsh Jeyasakthivel, a 23-year-old from Boston, was serving at a county food bank in rural Pennsylvania when he and his fellow volunteers were suddenly pulled from service.
'Non Americorps ppl are still distributing,' he wrote to WIRED in a Signal message, sending a photo of yellow-vested volunteers working on a line in a parking lot.
The AmeriCorps NCCC program was established under the Clinton administration by the National and Community Service Trust Act, signed in 1993. Each year, it recruits 2,200 people between the ages of 18 to 26 to serve in teams working across the country on different projects. Some volunteers also work directly alongside staff from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Forest Service, as part of smaller programs that are run within the NCCC. Graduates of the program get access to an award to help pay off federal student loans.
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Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Yahoo
Court hands a lifeline to AmeriCorps, but its future remains uncertain
Green Bay Conservation Corps workers, from left, Emily Swagel, Zak King and Cailie Kafura, plant native shrubs in Fireman's Park. The work is part of installing a pollinator corridor and a larger land restoration project across Green Bay. (Photo courtesy of Green Bay Conservation Corps) Jake White says he was lucky. A University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate with a global health major, White was in his second year of an AmeriCorps placement in the Sawyer County Public Health Department, where he helped out with department reports and outreach to the community. Then AmeriCorps pulled the plug at the end of April — cancelling its grants to agencies all across the country. White was in the middle of working with a team assigned to produce a community health assessment for the county when he got the news. Sawyer County kept him on so he could stick with the project, converting his position to a limited-term employee (LTE) through the end of June, when White starts medical school in Wausau. The reprieve also gave him a chance to hand over a second project, on substance abuse prevention, to another community member, White said. The future of that work was one of his biggest worries about AmeriCorps' sudden shutdown. His AmeriCorps experience at the county 'really gave me the foundation for the skills and knowledge I will carry into my role as a physician,' White told the Wisconsin Examiner. The aftermath of the AmeriCorps shutdown didn't go as smoothly for Maxwell Robin. He was placed with the St. Vincent DePaul charitable pharmacy in Madison. 'I did whatever needed to be done,' Robin said — working on computer projects at the pharmacy, filling prescriptions, serving as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking patients. When the AmeriCorps cancellation notice arrived, the projects he was working on 'got thrown into chaos,' Robin said a week after the notification. Now a federal judge has ordered AmeriCorps to restore its grants and reinstate its volunteers. But all of that remains up in the air. 'Things are just very confusing now,' Robin said Friday. Despite that, Robin has been able to move on. He is waiting to hear back from several job applications. And he still volunteers part-time at the pharmacy, where he developed a strong interest in working in the nonprofit sector. 'We were able to take people who, for whatever reason, had been kicked to the side,' Robin said. The federal judge's order, issued Thursday, includes an injunction ordering the federal government to reverse the cancellation of AmeriCorps grants and projects across the country and to restore those programs, funding and personnel. But program administrators still don't know for sure what will happen and when. 'We are still waiting for official notification from AmeriCorps,' said Jeanne Duffy, the executive director of Serve Wisconsin, in an email message Friday. Serve Wisconsin, based in the Wisconsin Department of Administration, is the state administrator for AmeriCorps. Wisconsin has 25 AmeriCorps programs operating in more than 300 locations across the state — volunteers who are paid a stipend and who work in health care, help with environmental projects, assist in school classrooms and carry out other projects. When the Trump administration canceled AmeriCorps grants April 25, the action caught participants in the program as well as officials responsible for coordinating its work by surprise. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul joined the federal lawsuit brought by 25 states to challenge the AmeriCorps shutdown. Thursday's order, by U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman in Maryland, found that the Corporation for National Community Service, the agency that operates AmeriCorps, and its administration 'likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking before making significant changes to service delivery, that the plaintiffs will be irreparably harmed if this injunction does not issue, and that the balance of the equities and the public interest favor an injunction.' The cancellation affected programs all over Wisconsin that have worked with AmeriCorps, some of them for years, and the volunteers who have flocked to AmeriCorps looking for experience through community service work. 'It's a tragedy,' said state Rep. Supreme Moore Omokunde (D-Milwaukee), who spent two years as an AmeriCorps participant 15 years ago. 'AmeriCorps is about volunteerism. We have limited resources and we have this unlimited need.' In Green Bay, AmeriCorps helped staff the Green Bay Conservation Corps. Founded in 2022, the Conservation Corps has fielded teams of AmeriCorps members each year on projects that have included establishing a pollinator corridor through the city, removing invasive plants, maintaining walking trails and restoring area streams. 'Altogether we've seen over 70 AmeriCorps members come through our doors,' said Maria Otto, the Green Bay Conservation Corps coordinator. 'They're the ones getting the work done.' The Green Bay city council passed a measure covering the rest of the 2025 service year from city funds. 'After two weeks of uncertainty, our entire crew was able to work for the Conservation Corps again' thanks to the funds, said Cailie Kafura, one of the AmeriCorps volunteers. The money will allow the program's work to keep going through August. 'We were doing a lot of work that people maybe don't even know is being done,' said Kafura. 'I know that the work I'm doing, I want to be doing that kind of work in the future. I want to be using my body and my mind for good out in the world.' Lynn Walter operates a nonprofit, New Leaf Foods, that promotes access to healthy food and education in the greater Green Bay area. Founded 15 years ago, New Leaf began working with AmeriCorps five years ago through a partnership with Marshfield Clinic. The clinic deploys AmeriCorps participants on health-related projects around the state. Walter said Friday after the cancellation she was able to retain one of her three AmeriCorps participants this year on a contract basis. A second AmeriCorps member chose to stay on as a volunteer to complete a project she had been working on, while the third needed more paid hours and went to another job. Even with the court ruling, Walter said, she's been told that what happens next remains uncertain. And she fears there's been longer-term damage regardless of what happens in the court case. 'Even if the program starts up again, there won't be the momentum that there has been in the past,' Walter said. She expects prospective participants to be wary of signing up in the future: 'What would you tell a young person?' In his early 30s, Omokunde joined Public Allies, a leadership development nonprofit, in 2010 and 2011 as an AmeriCorps participant. He called the experience 'a tipping point' for him personally and professionally. 'One of the core values is collaboration,' Omokunde said. 'It taught me that collaboration is one of the most difficult things to do — but it's one of the most necessary things to do.' Omokunde is blunt in his assessment of why AmeriCorps was targeted in President Donald Trump's second term. 'I think it follows a long tradition of people not valuing the work that is done in certain communities,' Omokunde said. 'Donald Trump is a bully. He doesn't want anything in opposition to him and his agenda.' Omokunde ticked off a list of colleagues in politics who came up through AmeriCorps and Public Allies: State Rep. Darrin Madison (D-Milwaukee), Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, former state Rep. David Bowen, and the late Milwaukee alder Jonathan Brostoff, also a former Assembly member. 'When he sees this cadre of individuals who are rooted in community and learning about asset-based community development, diversity and being committed to anti-oppression as well, people who represent all people, he doesn't want that kind of opposition,' Omokunde said. 'He just wants people to go along and do his bidding.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
WIRED
07-06-2025
- WIRED
Tech Up Your Sourdough With These Upper-Crust Baking Gadgets
Sourdough bread is one of the most wonderful things you can make with your hands, but it can be fussy and hard to get consistently right. These three new devices eliminate most of the guesswork. Courtesy of Sourdough Sidekick All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. I love making sauerkraut. I've almost always got a batch actively fermenting and another in the fridge, ready to eat. It's a project that can take a week or two, almost entirely hands-off once the veggies are cut and salted. To keep the active batch happy—it likes hanging around between 65 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit—I typically I keep it near the slider by my desk on the shady side of the room, closer to the glass if it needs to be cooler, a little farther away if it's cold out. Making sourdough bread, however, is a much more complicated process that involves different stages of fermentation that tend to like it hot. When you're starting a new batch of starter—the yeasty mixture that gives the loaf the bubbles to rise and the tang to light up your taste buds—it likes temperatures in the mid to high 70s to low 80s, what's affectionately known as the Goldilocks zone, not too hot and not too cool. Temperature control is key for the sourdough making process, and a group of new, recent, and forthcoming products that help coddle your starter and dough might just be enough help for people on the edge to become full-fledged sourdough people. In your home, finding consistently warm-enough spots can be daunting, especially for those of us who are newer or more casual sourdough bakers. While sauerkraut is pretty simple and forgiving, making sourdough is not. It is variables galore as you work to coax flour and water from separate states into a delicious risen loaf. This is particularly noticeable when you're in the week-plus project of creating starter, then keeping it happy for months or years. The variables of making and maintaining starter include weights of water, one or two kinds of flour, and the starter itself. It involves the temperature of that water and the temperature you store it at. Once you're ready to make a loaf, sourdough bread making is often a two-day process with multiple steps and techniques, wherein temperature control is critical in keeping the dough happy. A perfect sourdough boule. PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES Bread making isn't one skill or technique, it's a bunch of them, and each step depends on the success of the ones before it. Somewhere in there, insert a problem, or just a little doubt about what you're doing. Maybe your starter smells funny, or the dough doesn't look like it does in the recipe photo. Then what? Some problems could be the result of the last thing you did or a skipped starter feeding from a week ago or something else entirely. Happy troubleshooting! When you're an amateur or parachuting into it for the first time, failure or at least disappointment is part of the game. If this both heightens your desire to make sourdough and spikes your anxiety, you'll understand why pegging any variables in the process can help eliminate confusion. The first product that caught my attention is the Sourdough Sidekick, a collaboration between King Arthur Flour and FirstBuild, GE Appliances' prototyping and product development lab. The countertop device is available for preorder and is due out early in 2026. Keeping starter happy means feeding or 'refreshing' it, which requires you to combine a tiny bit of the existing batch with water and flour to keep the bacteria and yeasts in the mixture happy and well fed. Some experts even recommend doing this twice a day … forever … which is fine if you bake on most days and is way too much if you no longer work from home, are a busy person, or would just rather not be beholden to a little jar of yeasty flour and water on your countertop. The Sidekick's schtick is that you can program it to prolong the time between your interactions with it as it automates the feeding. It even has a mode where you tell it when you'll be baking and it will make sure that your starter is timed out perfectly for your dough and make a little extra to keep your starter refreshed in perpetuity. (Non-nerds, skip the following sentence: It can even turn your starter into levain for your bread and leave enough at the end to keep the starter rolling.) It also cuts down on waste and time spent cleaning by using tiny doses of flour and water during the refreshments. The Sourdough Sidekick Courtesy of Sourdough Sidekick I got a Zoom call walk-through on this from Rick Suel, engineering director at FirstBuild's Louisville, Kentucky, headquarters, and it's easy to see how the Sidekick could make bread making and starter maintaining easier. The machine looks and acts a bit like a fully automatic coffee machine with a flour hopper up top and a water tank in the back. The two ingredients are stirred together in the fermentation vessel, and the amounts are adjusted depending on ambient temperature. It's pretty slick. Brød & Taylor takes a different tack to achieve a similar effect. Its Sourdough Home ($119) looks like a shoebox-sized countertop fridge and it can hold starter anywhere between 41 and 122 degrees. For me, this meant I could hold my starter at 80 degrees, the recommended temperature in the recipe I used, and keep it there during the 10-plus days of starter creation. I wasn't finding anything warmer than 77 degrees next to my fridge, so when I was troubleshooting on day six or seven, I stuck it in the freshly arrived Home and didn't have to worry about the temperature being a factor anymore. The Sourdough Home Courtesy of Brød & Taylor The Home also has the ability to space out your sourdough refreshments, not by Sidekick-style microdoses but by cooling the temperature of your starter. Fermentation will happen at preferred speeds, but cooling the starter slows the process down, allowing you to refresh less. The first time I tried it at a lower temperature, following two weeks of daily refreshments, I set it to 50 degrees and walked away, sort of stunned to see it bubbly and happy 48 hours later, compared to how spent and flabby it would have been if it was held that long at 80 degrees. It was easy to see how something like this is appealing to both beginner and experienced bread bakers. Controlling the temperature is also extremely helpful once you start making bread. SourHouse, which came out with the starter-coddling Goldie a few years back, just released the DoughBed ($280), a heated, happy place for dough to rise, if you can afford that hefty price. Sourdough loaves often have two separate fermentation periods. The first, 'bulk fermentation,' is where the dough rises and develops flavors. Later, after a bit of shaping, it proofs in a vessel—often a basket—that helps it rise and ferment a bit more while formed in the shape of the loaf to come. The DoughBed is a pill-shaped glass bowl that fits over a heating pad and under an insulated cork lid. It helps keep bulk fermentation on track by holding the dough between 75 and 82 degrees. The bowl's long, flat bottom allows for more dough to be as close as possible to the heat. I usually do bulk fermentation in an eight-quart Cambro container, at which point it's either at the mercy of the ambient temperature in my house or I tuck it into that warm spot next to my fridge. I call it ready when it is notably risen and is both a bit smoothed out and bubbly. If you like that readiness on more of a schedule, the DoughBed's consistent temperature helps get the dough where you want it, when you want it. If you are on a schedule, you'll appreciate this predictability. The DoughBed Courtesy of SourHouse Of course, I put this stuff to the test, following Maurizio Leo's starter-creation instructions and his beginner's sourdough recipe. It really enveloped my life, becoming an oddly emotional roller coaster for someone like me who was not on the lookout for new hobbies. Leo breaks bread making down into eight main steps, in addition to the daily care of your starter. There is a lot to learn for each part of the process. When you're busy learning or getting better at a bunch of consecutive new steps, errors can compound, potentially not even presenting themselves immediately. Controlling a few variables helps keep you on the right path and I appreciated both the Sourdough Home and the DoughBed because they clearly helped keep things moving in the right direction. In the end, it was not bakery-quality bread I made, but it was surprisingly good and something I was happy to share. I have no doubt that using both helped make for a better final product. It's definitely possible to approximate the temperatures you're looking for with these new devices by putting your starter in a warm spot in your home like on top of the fridge, next to the rice cooker, or, the herpetologist's favorite, on top of a $13 reptile heating pad. (Hat tip to Paul Adams at America's Test Kitchen who turned me on to that one!) If you can get the right temperature consistently using one of those options, go for it. But if you are new to the game, like the process, want to keep some uncertainty out of it, and are perhaps on a bit of a schedule, you might want to take a closer look at them. They will take some of the guesswork out of your baking and get you to better bread sooner.
Yahoo
05-06-2025
- Yahoo
Gov. Shapiro responds after judge restores Pennsylvania's AmeriCorps funding
(WHTM) — More than $6 million in AmeriCorps funding must go back to Pennsylvania, a federal judge in Maryland ruled Thursday. Last month, Governor Josh Shapiro joined 25 other states in a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump's decision to cancel AmeriCorps grants. U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman issued a temporary court order blocking the order after finding it likely violated a federal law requiring a public notice-and-comment period. Shapiro celebrated the judge's decision in a social media post. 'The federal government made a commitment to organizations across the Commonwealth, and with the abrupt termination of AmeriCorps, the Trump Administration went back on that commitment without obeying the law,' the governor said. 060525_AmeriCorps_PI_OrderDownload AmeriCorps has 655 active members serving at 248 sites in 41 counties throughout Pennsylvania, according to the governor's office. The organization distributes funds for supports services, volunteer organizations, literacy and math programs, parks, veterans programs and natural disaster assitance. What is the PA State Grant Program? Shapiro argued the cuts would put services for children, seniors, parks and education at risk. 'It's my job as Governor to protect the interest of Pennsylvania taxpayers – and I will continue to take action to ensure no Pennsylvania senior, veteran or student is harmed by the federal government's decision to go back on its word,' Shapiro said. Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now AmeriCorps launched in 1993 as a government agency for national and community service. The organization said it places 200,000 people with nonprofit, community and faith-based organizations each year. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
