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Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
NH delegation slams 'reckless cuts' to AmeriCorps
Three-quarters of the state's congressional delegation attacked what they called the Trump administration's "reckless cuts" to the AmeriCorps program during a Manchester event Monday. Leaders of City Year estimated the impact to New Hampshire from lost grants was about $5 million. 'For decades, AmeriCorps members have put ideology aside to work for our communities and fill critical service gaps,' said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H. 'I heard from volunteers in the Granite State today, and Trump's shameful cuts to this bipartisan program would be devastating for the Granite Staters they serve.' Along with City Year, the event attracted leaders of conservation groups that have benefited from the program. "AmeriCorps members do critical work for our communities, but the Trump administration's funding cuts and firing of AmeriCorps staff are threatening this work,' said Sen. Maggie Hassan, also D-N.H. The Trump White House has said critical audits of AmeriCorps in recent years revealed millions of dollars in improper payments. Officials called AmeriCorps a 'target-rich environment for President Trump's agenda to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse." Rep. Maggie Goodlander, D-N.H., said she'll keep fighting to restore the program. 'The returns on investment are real: Every $1 that Congress invests in AmeriCorps generates more than $30 in returns to communities across New Hampshire,' Goodlander said. 'AmeriCorps changes lives for the better and its spirit of volunteerism is core to who we are as a state and as a nation." The Trump administration ended nearly $400 million in grants in AmeriCorps' roughly $1 billion budget and also fired most of its staff in April. About 32,000 lower-level workers were let go and an estimated 1,000 programs were eliminated. A Trump administration notice said the grants erased didn't fit AmeriCorps priorities. Two lawsuits have been filed over the changes, one by leaders in two dozen blue states and another by community organizations. Both alleged President Trump lacked the authority to gut the agency that was created and financed by Congress for decades. Monday's event was at the Manchester School District Welcome Center.
Boston Globe
19-05-2025
- General
- Boston Globe
‘What's more patriotic than Americans helping other Americans?'
Send questions or suggestions to the Starting Point team at . If you'd like the newsletter sent to your inbox, . TODAY'S STARTING POINT Nicole Kach has always wanted to help people. Growing up in Seekonk, Mass., Kach cleared trails with the Girl Scouts and volunteered at the town food pantry. During her junior year at UMass Dartmouth, she led a service trip to Guatemala to help install water filtration systems. So when the head of her college's office of community service suggested she consider serving with AmeriCorps after graduating last spring, Kach agreed. She applied to be a team leader with the National Civilian Community Corps, part of a network of AmeriCorps programs that fields teams of young adults to work on community service projects across the US for months at a time. 'It's important to give back to others,' Kach wrote in her application, 'and I believe that participating in AmeriCorps is one of the ways I can do that.' A few months later, Kach was on the other side of the country, leading a team of a dozen NCCC members to fireproof a campsite and retreat center in Julian, Calif. After that, her team headed to the Seattle area, where they worked at a food bank and helped low-income residents file their taxes. Advertisement Then Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency stepped in. Advertisement Kach was helping a woman with her tax return when her boss called. The Trump administration had ordered her team demobilized. Kach and her fellow corps members needed to leave their worksite, pack their things, and return to AmeriCorps' regional hub in Sacramento immediately. Their service was over. 'I just remember dropping to the floor and just sobbing,' Kach said. 'Probably the hardest thing that I've ever done was telling the team that we were going home.' Besides sadness, Kach's main emotion was confusion. Congress had already appropriated funding for AmeriCorps. Her team was already out in the field. 'We just all thought that we were doing such good work for the communities we were in,' she said. (The White House has called AmeriCorps 'a target-rich environment for President Trump's agenda to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse,' even though an audit of the agency last year made no claims of fraud Besides Kach's, the administration has demobilized NCCC teams that were building homes in North Carolina, facilitating afterschool programs in Arizona, and Advertisement It's hard for me to be objective about Kach and her work because I also did AmeriCorps. For 10 months between high school and college, I served as a tutor and classroom assistant in a Boston public school with an AmeriCorps program called City Year. The administration's grant terminations have impacted City Year's operations in several cities, a program spokesman told me. AmeriCorps has long had bipartisan support. The agency began in 1993 under Bill Clinton, but many Republicans 'People I'm talking with are in advanced stages of sorrow,' Goldsmith said. Their concerns reflect the many ways AmeriCorps' work helps people. Independent studies find that some of the agency's programs generate National service also exposes those who undertake it to people unlike themselves. Kach's team reflected the country, comprising corps members from Texas, New Jersey, Ohio, Arizona, and Puerto Rico. The City Year team I served on remains the most socioeconomically diverse group I've ever worked with. 'You can think about it as helping understand the lives of others, which is important,' said Goldsmith, who is now a Harvard professor. 'But you can also think about it as a training ground for civic leadership.' Advertisement AmeriCorps isn't for everyone. The work is poorly compensated and can be grueling. Kach received a $500 stipend every two weeks; her corps members got even less. Over five months, four of them dropped out. 'I went into AmeriCorps knowing I was gonna be dirt poor,' Kach said. 'I did it because I believed in the mission.' Kach is now back at her parents' home in Seekonk applying for jobs. She's confident she'll land on her feet, but less sure about those her service was helping. 'It's a question as to who's going to do this work,' she said. Still, Kach left even more convinced that AmeriCorps was good for her, is good for America, and is worth preserving. 'It made me realize for sure that the biggest thing I want to do is to continue to help the country,' she said. 'That sounds so cringey to be like, 'I want to keep helping people!' But it's honest-to-God true.' 🧩 6 Across: | ⛅ 61 ° POINTS OF INTEREST Canton, Mass. Barry Chin/Globe Staff Boston and Massachusetts Karen Read retrial: Testimony has given Canton, the town where John O'Keefe died, a reputation for hard drinking and casual drunk driving. The data Looking ahead: This spring has been warmer and wetter than usual. Here's what that RIP: Charlene Roberts-Hayden grew up in Medford and became a pioneering Black woman in computer programming. She Trump administration Russia-Ukraine war: Russia launched hundreds of drones against Ukraine. Trump is scheduled to speak with Vladimir Putin today in an effort to end the war. ( Israel-Hamas war: After US pressure, Israel said it would allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza even as it began a new ground offensive there. ( Trump's agenda: A House committee advanced Trump's tax bill after conservative Republican holdouts, who blocked it last week for not cutting Medicaid sooner, relented in exchange for promised changes. ( Friendly fire: Mike Pence, Trump's former vice president, praised Trump for securing the southern border, but called his tariffs a tax hike. ( New pope: JD Vance, Trump's current vice president, met with Pope Leo XIV in Rome. ( Haitian Flag Day: On the holiday, Boston City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune The Nation and the World Collision: Officials are investigating what caused a Mexican Navy training vessel to hit the Brooklyn Bridge, killing two sailors. ( Fertility clinic bombing: The FBI identified the suspect who detonated a car bomb in Palm Springs, Calif., as a man who said he opposed bringing people into the world against their will. ( N.J. strike: New Jersey Transit's train engineers reached a tentative deal to end a three-day strike that disrupted service to New York City and elsewhere. ( Tornados: After deadly twisters struck Kentucky and Missouri, locals reported tornado damage in Colorado and Kansas. ( International elections: Bucharest's liberal, pro-Europe mayor won Romania's presidential election, beating a right-wing nationalist. ( BESIDE THE POINT By Teresa Hanafin 🗓️ Free events this week: A best margarita contest, outdoor exercise classes, a BPL film screening, free concerts, 🌞 Summer Arts Guide: Globe critics and contributors have put together a comprehensive list of Advertisement 📺 TV this week: Julianne Moore stars in a dark comedy, Sarah Silverman mourns her parents, Tyler Perry has a new political sitcom, 🍿 Movie review: The recap of the entire Mission: Impossible series that opens the latest installment is tedious. But when the action starts, 🎭 SNL rumors: The last episode of SNL's 50th season Saturday had no cast goodbyes, so speculation over who's leaving — including boss Lorne Michaels — is rampant. ( 🙏 Appreciating New England: Quit whining about the rain and look around, photographer Stan Grossfeld says: 🔌 Worker beware: Even if your boss tells you to unplug outside of work hours, she may not mean it. And could ding you for it. ( 🥒 Food watch: Deli meat, cucumbers, and some cheeses made Consumer Reports' list of the 10 riskiest foods to eat because of the frequency of bacterial contamination. ( ⚾️ Fat chance: One-time Red Sox nemesis Ron Darling, the former Mets pitcher who grew up in Millbury, considers himself Thanks for reading Starting Point. This newsletter was edited by ❓ Have a question for the team? Email us at ✍🏼 If someone sent you this newsletter, you can Advertisement 📬 Delivered Monday through Friday. Ian Prasad Philbrick can be reached at
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Americorps cuts hit Ohio classrooms
(Stock photo from Getty Images) My partner is a 10th-grade geometry teacher at Mifflin High School, a Columbus City Schools secondary school on the northeast side. For the past three years, she has had an assistant from the City Year program. This is an AmeriCorps program that places qualified full-time volunteers in schools to support teachers and the development of children. Her City Year volunteer was a kind person who supported children and helped with her workload of teaching math to high school-age children. It wasn't rare for her to come home telling me she didn't know what she would do without her City Year volunteer. She will have to figure that out soon. Earlier this week, she arrived at school to find her City Year volunteer was gone. By the end of the day, an announcement was made to the school: Columbus City School's 30-year relationship with the City Year program was over. This was a direct result of the federal Department of Government Efficiency's decision last week to cut 41% of the AmeriCorps program budget. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX AmeriCorps was the beginning of my career. I enrolled as a full-time volunteer a few months after graduating from Denison University and was selected to serve as a community organizer supporting neighborhood associations for the mayor of Omaha, Nebraska. At the same time, my mother, back in the workforce with her three children out of high school, enrolled in AmeriCorps to evaluate literacy instruction programs for young children. In 2020, my firm Scioto Analysis conducted a cost-benefit analysis of AmeriCorps programs in Ohio. We found that the programs have significant impacts on the trajectory of participants. People who enroll in the program have much higher future earnings and lower chances of criminal justice involvement. The best evidence available tells us cutting AmeriCorps will result in lower wages and higher crime rates for Ohio. We found that the net benefits of the program in Ohio range somewhere from from $1 million to $30 million and that expansions of the program could push net benefits into the nine-figure range. It seems that the decisions being made at the federal level are blind to one side of the accounting ledger. In the fervor to reduce spending and cut administrative offices at the federal level, DOGE leader Elon Musk and other decision makers are failing to consider the benefits of programs they eliminate. I have no doubt in my mind that there are reasonable cuts that can be made to federal programs. The problem is that the current approach is not reasonable: it is the public finance equivalent of conducting open-heart surgery with a chainsaw. The sad thing about this from the perspective of the fiscal hawk is that these cuts will have very little effect on the federal debt. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, even a spending cut 1,000 times the size of the AmeriCorps cut last week would only reduce the federal-debt-to-GDP ratio by one percentage point in the next decade. Cutting AmeriCorps is a drop in the bucket in the context of U.S. debt. The benefits of cutting Americorps funds are hard to divine. Its costs are clear. In the meantime, volunteers will be lost and children from low-income families in a high-poverty school district will have one less resource available to them in their already under-resourced classrooms. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Federal cuts hit Columbus program helping better the lives of youth
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — As of last week, approximately $400 million in AmeriCorps grant funding has been cancelled nationally. 'To see that funding is going away and that we may have to make other decisions that will impact lives is very, very scary,' Adero Robinson, former executive director of City Year Columbus, said. The cuts, made last Friday, are the latest in the Department of Government Efficiency's (DOGE) effort to slim down government spending. It has now left programs that rely on that money scrambling to figure out how to continue services. Ohio grant canceled by DOGE leaves these LGBTQ+ historical markers in limbo 'The first thing I asked was, 'When did serving become a sin?'' Tei Street, former City Year Columbus leader, said. 'And when did helping other people become wasteful? Because supposedly everything is about eliminating waste.' As the federal agency for national service and volunteerism, AmeriCorps provides funding for organizations that offer community services like City Year. City Year is an education-focused program dedicated to school and student success. According to City Year's national office, it's being impacted by AmeriCorps grants termination at seven of its 29 sites, including Columbus and Cleveland. Many of its members learned the news on Tuesday. 'Kids were crying, corps members who have given their all this year, they were crying. It was a very upsetting day,' Street said. The cuts could put thousands out of work, and frustration and anger has followed the news. 'I'm not sure where they go and I'm not sure who helps the people that they are serving,' Lourdes Barroso de Padilla, Columbus City Councilmember and former City Year Columbus leader, said. 'I'm not sure how we address some of the critical needs that AmeriCorps members are addressing every single day.' Ohio museums, art groups hit by DOGE cuts City Year members do everything from working in after-school programs to getting students ready for college. 'What do you tell young people when you say it's important to give back to your country and to your communities, but you take away one of the mechanisms to do that,' Robinson said. 'One of the ones that's worked.' Former City Year leaders said the work done by AmeriCorps members in central Ohio has made a measurable difference. 'I got to watch as kids' scores and reading went up as they had city or mentors working with them and coaching them through the reading process,' Street said. Robinson remembers his time helping young boys in a fifth-grade classroom in Columbus. He ran into one of them years later at the grocery store. 'He said, 'I remember you taught me how to shoot a basketball, and you taught me how to read,'' Robinson said. ''You taught me how to stand up for myself. You taught me all these things,' and I'm like, 'You remember that? That was a long time ago,' and he said, 'I'llnever forget that you spent time with me.'' House Bill 6's repeal, Delta-8 THC among bills moving through Ohio Statehouse A statement from City Year's national office reads: We know that City Year is being impacted by AmeriCorps grants termination at seven of our 29 sites: Columbus, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and Sacramento. We're working closely with the site leadership at those seven locations to support our corps and staff. Corps service at all other sites in the City Year network remains unchanged and continues at this time. This is an evolving situation that we are monitoring closely in the days ahead. Our priority is supporting our corps members who serve as student success coaches and protecting their vital work in our schools and communities. The White House on Tuesday pointed to improper payments reported by AmeriCorps, totaling more than $40 million in 2024 and attributed to insufficient documentation from grantees, calculation errors and miscoded expenses. 'President Trump has the legal right to restore accountability to the entire Executive Branch,' Anna Kelly, White House deputy press secretary, said in an email. Trump targets accreditors responsible for Ohio law and medical schools' certification 'Every time we take something away, we leave a gap somewhere,' de Padilla said. 'And who's filling that gap?' NBC reached out to AmeriCorps' leadership for comment but has not heard back. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
City Year Providence to debut Young Hero Award at 2025 Red Jacket Gala
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) — City Year Providence is set to host its annual Red Jacket Gala on Friday, May 9, to honor local community leaders. The Red Jacket Gala brings together City Year champions, alumni, educators, corporate partners, and other supporters for an night of connection and inspiration, according to organizers. The event also recognizes the efforts of City Year AmeriCorps members, who dedicate a year of service as Student Success Coaches. These members work alongside teachers in systemically under-resourced schools to help boost student achievement. New this year, the inaugural Young Hero Award will be presented to a student—or group of young people—who exemplify the city's values through exceptional service, leadership, and dedication to their community, organizers said. The gala will take place from 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the WaterFire Arts Center on Valley Street. Tickets are available online through WaterFire's the and apps to get breaking news and weather alerts. Watch or with the new . Follow us on social media: Close Thanks for signing up! Watch for us in your inbox. Subscribe Now Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
