By Annie Nova
Over the past two decades, the New York Restoration Project has created dozens of community gardens across the city. The Project’s workers help pick up trash, cut the grass and tend to the fruits and vegetables.
Key to the project’s success are its recruits from AmeriCorps, members who perform national service for about a year in exchange for around a $12,000 salary and $5,000 education stipend.
Last month, however, the Restoration Project learned that it had lost funding for its 27 AmeriCorps members — a move that means fewer workers to help forge new gardens and maintain those already established.
“I might have to cut a third of my program,” said Catherine Hall, the organization’s senior vice president. “It’s very painful.”
In his initial budget proposal, President Trump called for major reductions to the nation’s public service programs. Among the cuts is the elimination of AmeriCorps which was created under President Clinton and expanded under President George W. Bush.
“It’s a shock to the system of national service — for the first time since the corporation’s creation we don’t have a president that we know is supportive of AmeriCorps,” said Melissa Bass, author of The Politics and Civics of National Service and the assistant professor of public policy leadership at the University of Mississippi.
So far, Congress has pushed back, voting to maintain the annual $1 billion in funding for the Corporation for National and Community Service, AmeriCorps’ parent agency. That legislation is yet to reach the White House.
But even as the funding debate continues, many local nonprofit groups in New York that rely on AmeriCorps funding are already feeling the squeeze.
Some of the cuts stem from decisions in Washington to end at least three nation-wide service programs launched under the Obama administration and which advocates say have been instrumental in their work with people living in poverty, immigrants and at-risk children.
In May, Congress quietly defunded the Social Innovation Fund, which had a $50 million budget and provided grants to social service organizations that aided the nation’s poorest.
“We’re disheartened,” said Nicole Truhe, the government affairs director at America Forward, a Washington-DC based public policy agency, which helped create the fund in 2009. The fund, Truhe said, “shined a light on what was working in communities and helped build on it.”
New York alone received one fifth of the Social Innovation Fund’s total budget.
Some 35 local groups in the state had relied on the Fund, including Bronx Works, which offers services to public housing residents in the South Bronx, the Arab-American Association of New York, a Brooklyn-based advocacy group, and the Children’s Aid Society, which was involved in a project to prevent teens from becoming pregnant.
Another program created under President Obama, called “justice AmeriCorps,” was shut down when the Department of Justice ended its partnership with the corporation. The program helped provide legal representation to undocumented children at risk of deportation.
Since it was launched in 2014, the program has provided attorneys for some 3,000 children across the nation who are between the ages of four and 16.
Megan Eiss-Proctor, who administered justiceAmeriCorps at Safe Passage Project of New York Law School, said the end of the program will be disruptive to ongoing cases. “Even if you’re opposed to the kids staying here, you need lawyers to help move the process along,” Eiss-Proctor said.
Corporation officials also shuttered another Obama-era program called “Operation AmeriCorps,” that was widely used in New York. Under the program, New York City was able to send 250 AmeriCorps members into struggling schools where they tutored students and encouraged parents to become involved in their children’s education.
Dabash Negash, who administered the program for the city, said the members’ work led to lower absenteeism rates and higher graduation rates. “They were playing a critical role in breaking the cycle of poverty in target communities by building infrastructure essential for long-term sustainability and success,” Negash said. “The end of the program is a loss to our schools, students and community members.”
A corporation spokesperson said that Operation AmeriCorps was terminated because it was only intended as a “one-time opportunity designed to last two years.” But when city officials sought to win funding from another AmeriCorps program to continue the school tutoring efforts, they ran into a different roadblock: an administrative decision by the corporation to reject both new funding proposals in the state as well as those seeking renewals.
Those cuts to New York’ programs, a spokeswoman for the corporation said, were triggered by a recent audit of New York’s national service system. The audit, commissioned under the Obama administration and completed this spring, faulted four of the state’s more than 30 AmeriCorps organizations for failing to “ensure proper criminal history checks” on program recruits as well as improperly documenting certain costs.
State officials contend that they’ve already fixed the problems cited in the audit and that the corporation’s rejection of new and renewal programs is an “extreme penalty” for a program that’s vital to many state antipoverty initiatives.
In a response to the audit in April, Linda Cohen, the executive director of the state’s AmeriCorps program, called the sanctions “unwarranted and unnecessary.”
State officials declined to publically comment on the funding changes, as they’re still trying to resolve their funding restrictions with the corporation. But they praised the role of AmeriCorps, saying that the members “fill a gap” in communities short on resources. “It’s the best kept secret in New York,” said Fran Barrett, interagency coordinator for not-for-profit services for Governor Cuomo.
New York has managed to salvage some of its proposals, including a state-wide anti-opioid addiction effort, by using a separate funding stream allotted to individual states. But records of the service corporation show that, overall this year, New York has received around $5 million less in funding from the service programs. That has meant 400 fewer AmeriCorps members this year compared to last, leaving many organizations strapped for funds and manpower.
Among those that lost funding is Grand Street Settlement, the century-old social services organization in New York City. For 20 years, AmeriCorps members at the organization tutored public school students in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side.
But this summer, Sue-Naina Lalchan, program director at Grand Street Settlement, learned she would lose her 55 AmeriCorps members.
“We were shocked,” Lalchan said. “It’s such an important program.”
Jack Salo, executive director of the Rural Health Network, a healthcare nonprofit in central New York, said his AmeriCorps staff this year dropped from 22 members to 11. Those members bring food to poor families and enable seniors to stay in their houses longer by helping to take care of them.
“We shouldn’t have to fight for national service,” Salo said.
Kate Sarata, the executive director of the Buffalo-based Service Collaborative of Western New York, expected to have 40 AmeriCorps members this year but ended up with 32. This means she’ll have eight fewer members, she said, to teach low-income people how to better manage their money.
“We had hoped each member would serve 100 individuals living in poverty,” Sarata said. “That’s 800 people that could be receiving financial literacy.”
Samantha Warfield, the press secretary at the Corporation for National and Community Service, defended the decision to reject the state’s new and renewal applications, citing the audit.
“It’s rare that a report would have such egregious findings, which is what prompted such a strong response from CNCS,” Warfield said. Other factors might also have affected the state’s total AmeriCorps funding, she added, including decisions by some groups not to reapply, or changes in the scale of their programs.
Shirley Sagawa, the CEO of Service Year Alliance who helped create AmeriCorps with Bill Clinton in the 1990s, called the corporation’s response to the audit “out of line” and “disproportionate.”
She said: “It’s not fair to penalize all of these programs.”
Corporation records show that in the past it has overruled similarly tough findings by its auditors. For example, in 2009, an auditor found that the Teaching’s Fellow Project at the City University of New York was unnecessary, and recommended that the program lose funding and repay the corporation $40 million. The corporation disagreed with the auditor’s conclusion, and never halted the program or demanded repayment from CUNY.
“When you look at the problems that show up in these audits, they’re not earth-shattering. A lot of them don’t have an effect at all,” Sagawa said. “There’s some very strong programs in New York, and for them to not get competitive funding will limit their growth significantly.”
Professor Bass said she was also skeptical that the audit’s findings were the sole reason for the cuts to the state’s programs. “This administration is learning ways to sabotage programs that still exist on the books,” she said.
This story was reported for NYC/45, a project of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.