My AmeriCorps.

Complex, imperfect, and more important than ever.

Photo by Shelley Pauls on Unsplash

I wrote six different drafts of this post and I’m still not sure why it’s taken me so long to write it.

The impetus for this writing angst is that early last month Trump or DOGE or the ghost of Andrew Jackson or whoever is making decisions these days announced the gutting of the AmeriCorps public service program. Most projects across the U.S. were told to halt work immediately.

After drafting and deleting the previous five versions of this post, I suspect it was difficult to write because twenty years later I’m still figuring out what I think about my own AmeriCorps experience.

I joined AmeriCorps via a work-study program in college, teaching science literacy to urban youth in Cleveland via urban gardening and watershed protection (yes, really).

Parts of the project were ludicrous. This was clear even to me at the time.

The housing project we were working in was one of the poorest in the nation. Teaching kids living in deep poverty about watersheds felt like a caricature of progressive earnestness. More harmful than ludicrous, we didn’t receive the training we needed - or even any warning, as far as I remember - about the neglect some of these kids had experienced and the environment we would be walking into. We were a gaggle of middle class white college students, completely untrained in education, pedagogy, or social work, dropped unceremoniously into an impoverished wasteland in the Cleveland Flats and instructed to teach black kids about the importance of not putting paint down storm drains.

While I’m not sure how much the kids learned about watershed protection (my guess is close to zero), it’s also true that I learned an enormous amount. It’s also true that, whatever my reservations about the details of my own AmeriCorps experience, I also know it’s one of the most important programs in America - especially now.

Poverty Up Close

The first thing I learned was the awful desolation of deep urban poverty.

While I had seen poverty up close in both Guatelama and my hometown of Rochester, this was a different level, at least in my memories. We had clean to maggots out of the community center kitchen sink before using it to wash the carrots we’d brought with us. The gym floor was covered in shattered glass, rendering it unusable. We walked around the projects at 9pm one night holding a toddler we found scratching at the locked community center door. He was eventually claimed by his babysitter, a 6 year old sibling. One afternoon we pushed the kids under a table when we heard gunfire in the street outside. The kids, in turn, scrambled out of our grasp to get to the windows to guess who was doing the shooting. The kids sang Nelly’s hit Country Grammar, including all the usually bleeped out words, and one day a knowing eight year old explained to me what a “street sweeper” was.

Agency and Connection

The second thing that struck me was the humanity, stuck in this awful place like the cliched flower growing out of a crack in concrete.

I met the mother of twin boys named Isaac and Isaiah who invited us into her immaculate apartment. She had a hand on each of her boys’ heads as she told us how she would be moving out of the projects as soon as she finished her nursing degree the following year. (As a mother now I laugh a bit that this dynamic and proud woman is nameless in my memory, just “Isaac and Isaiah’s mom.”) We worked with an elderly volunteer with gout who helped us navigate the community center, judging both us and her community in different ways but with a kind of grudging affection at the same time. The little girls clustered around us during lessons to play with our hair, so different in texture from their own, while the boys climbed the male AmeriCorps members like jungle gyms. On a different project, I met Daniel: a chubby middle schooler with kind but sad eyes who wrote poetry and wanted to be a rapper and who was profoundly moved when I told him that people actually do write for a living. One afternoon I held proud and fierce Ishmael, my favorite of all the kids, as he sobbed in my arms on a nature hike because he thought his cousin Demetrius was being attacked by a bear. The squirrel that had actually startled the kids was long gone by the time Ishmael released my neck, wiped his tears, and put his King of the Projects facade back on to join the group.

Injustice, High and Low

AmeriCorps was also where I first learned about what political theorists call structural injustice.

One of our goals in this housing project was to build and plant a vegetable garden, to teach these kids who didn’t get enough to eat about making healthy choices, I guess. Less cynically, maybe it was also a chance for them to watch something grow in that barren space. Either way, as part our agreement with the granting agency, we had to send soil samples off for testing, which we duly did.

A few weeks later, the results came back. The soil was so heavily contaminated with heavy metals, primarily lead, that we weren’t allowed to build our garden. I remember hearing the results while staring at the kids playing on the playground on the same site.

There was no grass on the playground, just dirt. The playground equipment was itself old, but what I remember most was the dirt. As the kids kicked off to swing, the dirt would swirl in the air, cover their arms and legs, get into their eyes.

Toddlers played in it like a sandbox. It coated their brown skin. They breathed it in.

We couldn’t build a garden on this site, but the state could build a playground.

It could expose these growing brains to soil deemed too dangerous to grow anything else in.

I wasn’t an activist then and I’m still not really now. But that lesson stuck with me. I knew, of course, that people are born into situations they don’t deserve, but it hadn’t yet struck me that people’s decisions in offices and boardrooms and legislative corridors many miles away could - with full knowledge - damage the brains of innocent children who lived on public assistance through no fault of their own.

And I hadn’t yet fully understood until then how the rules in one context don’t apply in others, no matter how unfair that is.

Poverty Tourism and Personal Growth

My AmeriCorps experience was equal parts ridiculous and beautiful, meaningful and painful, not nearly enough and not even the best we could do. I doubt those kids remember me, but I remember them. I’m not sure how much our carrots and apples helped the gnawing hunger in their stomachs, but I do know that when Ishmael ran to me and threw himself into my arms, it meant something. I sat on the pavement with him and told him it would be ok even though I wasn’t sure it would be, really.

Even then, I knew enough to know that bears wouldn’t be the scariest thing Ishmael would face in his life.

But I also knew that, whatever else we did that year, we created a space for an hour a week where those kids would get a snack and play with some young adults who gave them their full attention.

I also know now that - whether those kids remember us or not - all of us AmeriCorps members remember those kids. And I’m guessing that like me my fellow AmeriCorps members developed a more complex understanding of poverty.

One that helped explain a lot of things, but also one that didn’t let anyone - parents, policymakers, average Americans - off the hook.

Trust and Engagement

I got back last week from a summit on trust and liberal democracy. One of the more interesting takeaways is that we know how to reduce polarization and restore trust. The wrinkle is that it’s hard to scale.

It turns out the most enduring way to reduce polarization is to get people from very different worlds together, in person, and have them interact over time in positive ways - share some meals or work on a common problem.

That’s more or less the goal of AmeriCorps.

Is it perfect? Of course not.

Is there waste? Maybe.

Is it important? Existentially, now more than ever.

Until recently, AmeriCorps had strong bipartisan support, precisely because the grants - while federally funded - do an enormous amount of work in local communities. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, noted on X (and requoted in the NYT): “I support improving efficiency and eliminating waste but I would have to object to cutting AmeriCorps grants like those that support Louisiana’s veterans and organizations that provide crucial support after hurricanes and natural disasters.”

But Cassidy was one of the few GOP members crawling out of the woodwork to defend AmeriCorps. While dozens of states are suing, these seem to be mostly states with Democratic leadership. Most GOP states, even states like Alabama and Wyoming, which had their funding slashed, have - as far as I can tell as of this writing - been stonily silent.

Conservatives and libertarians could, on principle, object to government funding for civil society projects like this if we already lived in connected communities. But we don’t.

In our current world, AmeriCorps should have widespread nonpartisan support. In fact, one of the most convincing defenses of AmeriCorps comes in 1996 from the Hoover Institution. Both libertarians and conservatives should support it as a way of funneling federal money back to local communities, where people understand the local issues they face and where they can connect with each other directly. Empowered rather than gutted, it could be a way to restore trust across party lines, reduce polarization, and jumpstart problem solving on some of our most pressing social issues. And even the smallest of small government libertarians wouldn’t start with AmeriCorps if they’re trying to reduce the bloated deficit. It’s barely a blip in the federal budget as it is.

AmeriCorps and Meaning

Twenty-plus years later, Ishmael won’t remember me. But I remember him. I remember what it felt like to catch a kid in free fall—not just from fear of an imaginary bear, but from a world that gave him far too few places to land.

My AmeriCorps wasn’t perfect. It was sometimes naive, sometimes underpowered. But it was also a glimpse of something that’s increasingly hard to access in a world of partisan, economic, racial, and educational sorting: a public good that was small, diverse, universal, local, human, and real. It fed kids, planted gardens (or tried to), soothed fears, built trust. It bridged divides not with rhetoric, but with snacks and shovels and hair braiding.

In a country where we increasingly don’t know each other—where our trust in institutions and each other is fraying—programs like AmeriCorps remind us what democracy looks like in four complex dimensions.

It’s messy, underprepared college students navigating discomfort and uncertainty while trying to make the world a better place.

It’s kids singing Nelly on swings who deserved much better than they got.

It’s a nameless mom of twin boys building a life beyond the margins.

Cutting AmeriCorps doesn’t just slash a line item. It severs a thread. And we need every thread we can get. Democracy doesn’t die from one catastrophic blow. It unravels quietly and incrementally with each thing we decide isn’t worth saving and with each connection with each other that we don’t make.

My AmeriCorps - with all its imperfections - was worth saving. It still is.

What You Can Do

The CorpsNetwork has a list of things you can do to fight back against the cuts to AmeriCorps. Obviously, your own legislators and governors are always a good place to start. You can also Google some of the AmeriCorps projects that have done good in your own community. There are probably more than you realize.

You can also look for similar groups including Urban Rural Action and Habitat for Humanity that link people from different backgrounds to solve common problems.

Finally, you can read Seth Kaplan’s wonderful book Fragile Neighborhoods. He’s an international expert in building and rebuilding robust communities and he’ll be joining us on Substack live on the podcast this Friday (June 4) at 10am EST. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll get a notification (so subscribe if you haven’t already!).

Your Turn

Do you have an AmeriCorps story? I’d love to hear it! Or anything else you’d like to share in the comments. And, as always, if you like what you read, please subscribe and share.