So, Trump Killed AmeriCorps NCCC

Or, the state of volunteerism in the modern U.S.

Yesterday, I was repairing drywall in a low-income household that had lost its second floor to an electrical fire. Halfway through the workday, my boss came in with a wild look in his eye and told my coworkers and I to drop our crowbars and leave. AmeriCorps NCCC, the volunteer program to which I’d given the past nine months of my life, had been cut. We were being sent home.

So… that just happened!

Basically, to quote my coworker, “The Trump administration has just smacked us all with its big, green weenie.”

What happened?

I don’t know with certainty where this decision came from. The possibility of defunding by republican-controlled Congress was brought up in March, but seemed to blow over. From what I’ve heard (and what other sources now report) this abrupt cessation was a consequence of one of Trump’s executive orders and/or a decision made by DOGE.

And so it’s illegal.

AmeriCorps receives its funding through Congress. Therefore, the executive branch does not have the authority to cut our funding. But my bags are packed nonetheless. I’m out of a job* nonetheless. All over the country, food pantries will lose capacity, houses will not be built, conservation data will not be gathered, and flood recovery will stall. Nonetheless. People will suffer materially, because the checks and balances are not functioning, or maybe were never anything but an illusion.

So that just happened!

*I was not technically an employee of this organization. I was a volunteer, or member. I’m going to keep referring to it as my job and my teammates as my coworkers because, like, if you work somewhere 9-5, 5 days a week, it’s a fucking job, even if it doesn’t pay.

What is/was the NCCC?

AmeriCorps is a federally-funded agency for stipended volunteer work. It has many branches that do a variety of different things. I’m in – or I was in – AmeriCorps NCCC, which is (was…) a 10-month residential volunteer program for people ages 18-26. Teams are deployed from multiple regions throughout the US and sent to various volunteer projects over a period of 10 months. Projects can be managed by nonprofits, volunteer organizations, or governmental agencies. They can include anything from hurricane response to conservation work to filing taxes for low-income families.

Now, AmeriCorps is not perfect. I have serious issues with the inconsistency of internal disciplinary procedures. I have issues with the lack of efficiency and with the overall culture.

Despite these issues, I want to expand on the vision behind the sometimes-clunky and underfunded execution, because NCCC offers something you can’t find anywhere else. It’s an option for young people* to get practical on-the-job training in a variety of hard skills, see the country, and (if you’re a bleeding heart like me) materially help people in difficult situations. It’s a recognized starting point for careers in parks, fire, emergency management, and construction. It’s a networking opportunity. It also offers a small scholarship at the end of the program.

I want you to mull this over for a minute. If you had a childhood social circle like mine, you’re aware that a significant amount of kids are desperate to escape their parents by any means possible, and many of them at least consider joining the military to do so. But AmeriCorps provides food, housing, job training, and limited college funds, and you don’t even have to kill anyone! I knew multiple people who came to AmeriCorps intending to get a head start in specific careers, and even though the program ended early, they got exactly what they came for.

Consider also that no one my age (in the accursed z/millenial complex) is getting fucking hired. We’re overeducated and underconnected, and we’re pretty damn burnt out from responseless, automated online job searches that, at best, result in fake jobs that help no one. Well, here was one way to get skills, references, and experience doing something that actually had a positive effect on the real world. I mean, to an unemployed college grad in 2025, that sounds unreal, doesn’t it?

In my vision of a functioning America – oxymoron, maybe – AmeriCorps NCCC is presented to high school grads as a life choice on the same tier as college and the military.

However, the final and most important piece of the puzzle doesn’t have to do with what NCCC provides (provided…) its members, but the function it served for the people outside of the program. Over the past nine months, I have seen firsthand the sheer amount of work to be done in this country. I’ve seen what people actually need. This year, I have become increasingly insulted by the fact that such topics like trans women’s place in sports dominate our political discourse when, in the reality I’ve seen with my own two eyes and worked on in some small way with my own two hands, the most pressing threat facing any normal person in this country is the state of our infrastructure.

It’s going to be hard to impress upon you the depth of this, but I’ll try*. Large swaths of this country do not have paid fire departments. Some are lucky to have a small group of volunteer firefighters or rescue workers. They do not have emergency management departments to speak of. What’s more, most people in these areas are under- or uninsured. Therefore, millions of people are at immediate risk for complete devastation in the event of any natural disaster – and those will only increase as we continue to push the climate past its crisis point. The sustainability and mitigation fields will need an immense amount of labor if we’re even to survive. That’s not even talking about the egregious lack of food, housing, and medical care that faces so many of us**.

And what did AmeriCorps do? It provided that work. It provided labor. It did so at negligible cost to the taxpayer, to the benefit of everyone involved. And instead of recognizing NCCC for the good it did and the vast potential it had to ameliorate some of the most pressing issues facing the people of this country, the administration killed it.

God forbid real work be done by and for the people.

*In any walk of life. I worked closely with everyone from aimless high school graduates to an ex-army electrical inspector.

**I say I have a right to say my piece on this. My team constituted nearly the entire flood recovery workforce of a small town after Hurricane Helene. We went on to work in Asheville. I saw some hairy shit, man! I saw people’s houses and livelihoods destroyed, smelled bodies on the riverbank! I mean, when you’ve shoveled river muck out of houses in 8 degree weather and sawed trees off of crying old women’s roofs, you can talk to me.

***Did you know the Lower Ninth Ward is still in disrepair 20 years after Katrina?

Note on FEMA

Instead of having its funding increased, as would make sense in the wake of devastating hurricanes and wildfires and in the certain face of many worse ones to come, FEMA will also be gutted. There was a branch of AmeriCorps NCCC that specifically worked with FEMA, collecting information after disasters and assisting people with aid appeals. Now that won’t be happening, at least in the four years to come*.

I was working in Appalachia after Hurricane Helene. I know what the sentiment was like. No, most people weren’t conspiracy theorists thinking FEMA was running death camps or whatthehellever, but the general opinion was not positive. The pervading feeling was that FEMA a) had shown up right after the disaster, but pulled out far too quickly, leaving everyone behind and bereft and b) was far inferior to the power of “people helping people.”

And I just want to say… like… FEMA doesn’t work that way. It comes in initially, does damage assessments, and then allocates work and funding to organizations that remain in the area. The organization I was working for while people were actively telling me how much better I was than FEMA, how it was great that I stayed while FEMA pulled out, that I was a real person instead of a Fed… was funded by FEMA. It didn’t abandon Appalachia. In the same sense, FEMA is “people helping people.” It enables that help to happen. What, did you think “people” just came with tools, materials, and transportation included?*

FEMA has a massive image problem, yes. I was explicitly told not to mention that I was associated with FEMA in case people got hostile**. It’s also not helped by the fact that FEMA seems to deny aid by default, forcing people to go through a confusing appeals process. But these are the problems of an organization that is underfunded and neglected.

*There’s also something to be said here about the dominance of religious organizations/religious funding streams in disaster recovery and the frequent use of that work as a means to proselytize, but I am not familiar enough with this landscape to say it.

**...Which does nothing to fix the image problem.

What Now? (What’s Happening in Volunteerism?)

Well, the best thing would be to overthrow the administration and build the Star Trek future or something, but excepting that…

Let’s be for real. If a Democrat were to win the next election – assuming there is to be a next election, and that no serious political upheaval has occurred within the U.S. left – they would not take any meaningful action to undo what Trump has done and would run on a promise not to make things worse. The oil pipelines will still be built. The libraries will stay closed. People will continue to die from the bombs we sell. Oh, God. It’s our responsibility to bring about a different reality than that.

Even though programs like NCCC are not going to be supported by the federal government in the coming years, I still believe that volunteerism is the answer to, like, at least 40% of The Youth’s solvable problems, even without the (very nice) incentives from Uncle Sam.

(Feeling disconnected? Want to gain a skill or start a career? Want to know what’s happening in your community? Want to be independent? Want to learn? Want to actually do something you can be proud of? …Want to live for something?)

Not everyone is going to want to or be able to commit to a residential or relocation-based program like NCCC. However, such programs do exist, if you’re interested. Not all of them rely on federal funding, and even some that do have not lost that funding. Some are religious in nature, but help and hire people regardless of faith (I’ve encountered IOCC and NECHAMA in the disaster recovery sphere). Disaster recovery is one of the fields with the most demand, but other residential opportunities are out there, too.

Then there’s the typical form of volunteering that you’re likely most familiar with: one-off events, like tree plantings, beach cleanups, and trash pickups. Well, maybe a trash pickup is hard to swallow for you. Isn’t it just moving trash from one ecosystem to another? However, even if trash pickups don’t solve the plastic problem at its root, they are, in my experience, highly valued and appreciated by community members. They’re also helpful in ecologically sensitive areas. These do have value, and they’re great ways to meet active people within your community.

However, I want to advocate for long-term volunteer commitments. This is, I think, the area with the most potential to make an impact, and the venue in which you’ll reap the most benefits as an individual (skills, references, resume, career, et cetera). I’ll put it to you this way: a beach cleanup can involve a lot of people and make a worthy difference, but sustained, consistent effort is what most organizations and communities really need. For example, my team’s sustained effort over a few weeks saved a conservation organization that usually only runs tree-plantings off volunteer labor more than $100,000 in contracted work, simply because we were able to be trained and consistently directed in the long term. It enables organizations to build real capacity, rather than dealing with 20 people who don’t know what’s going on for one day*.

The problem is – and I fully understand how hard this is – that finding opportunities like that is hard. If you’re in a small town, fire and emergency management might be desperately in need of you. Otherwise, I still don’t know where to point you specifically, and I’ve been doing this for nearly a year. That’s where the short-term things come in. Go to a beach cleanup and ask around about what people are involved in. Try to find a recurring event – your local nature preserves might have monthly invasive plant removal days. Pop into a small local museum and ask what work they need done. Odds are, in any of these cases, you’ll end up surrounded by epic old women who are chomping at the bit to get young people involved in whatever cause they’re championing.

As with everything in life, the secret to this is just showing up places and asking around. Coincidentally, that’s how you find out what the hell your community actually is – what it’s like, how it functions, where the axes of power lie – and what its history means.

*From an organization’s perspective, the work that’s happening on a one-off event day is handling volunteers.

So.

For all Trump and his pet nazi claim to make these cuts to help the American people, they seem highly invested in destroying every effective avenue for us to help each other. Volunteerism — which, again, make up a negligible percentage of government spending — is neither the first nor the last social network they will attack.

Volunteerism will not cease to exist. The problems it seeks to solve are not going anywhere. It’s become clear that the people in power in this country do not care for the people who live here. They do not care about the hardships we face, what we actually need, or what we do for each other. If you look for help from the top, you will not get it.

Institutions like AmeriCorps NCCC may be done for, but the ideas they represented, the benefits they offered, and the people who powered them are not. Now the government wants nothing to do with volunteerism – Alright! Fine! There are still so many things that need doing. We can decide, each one of us, to take control of our lives and do them.

Under capitalism, it’s hard to think of unpaid work as anything other than exploitation. But even in a perfect world, we would want and need work – work done for the sake of each other, for ourselves. We don’t need to endlessly drain our souls into Indeed cover letters and the machine of the grind. There is another way. It’s here, right where I am and right where you are. It’s in the parks and the streets and the people. That’s how we build – from the ground up, hand in hand.

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The End of Outrage