When the Trump administration announced earlier this year that it was pulling funding for the Corporation for National and Community Service—popularly known as AmeriCorps—it was yet another blow to the public service sector and a personal offense to me.
AmeriCorps can be best described as a domestic version of the Peace Corps. But rather than send service members abroad, AmeriCorps’ efforts are focused here at home. There’s a wide variety of AmeriCorps programs, from those who provide direct service to those who work in administrative capacities.
I served with AmeriCorps from 2017 to 2018 in Memphis, Tennessee, as part of Impact America. It was a great opportunity. I had just graduated from the University of Memphis and needed to find something. I also needed and wanted experience in doing something different, something that wasn’t writing research papers.
Impact America, which is based in Birmingham, Alabama, provided that different experience. I was fortunate enough to be selected for the final spot on our team by Kyra Hanlon and John Gilmer, our team’s co-directors who served in the same office as AmeriCorps members the year before. They taught me leadership and communication skills that I use to this day.
I had the added benefit of being a DeltaCorps member, which was a collaboration between Impact and the Delta Regional Authority. While my fellow team members worked primarily in Tennessee, I did a lot of my work in the Mississippi Delta and across the river in West Memphis and Marion, Arkansas.
Our team worked on two primary initiatives. The first is FocusFirst, a program where we visited daycare centers and schools and screened young children for vision issues using highly advanced spot cameras. The cameras are able to detect with a high accuracy whether a child has an issue like nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism or more serious issues. Impact then refers those children to free or reduced follow-up care.
The second initiative is SaveFirst, a free tax-preparation service for those with low-to-moderate incomes. Our purpose was to guide people through the tax preparation process in a transparent manner and serve as a resource for them if they needed issues.
The Reason to Serve
You may be thinking what the possible connection between vision screenings and tax preparation could be. The connection is helping reduce barriers created by poverty. If a child has a serious vision issue, they may not be able to communicate it. Vision care can be expensive and prohibitively so, especially if the diagnosis is serious.
Tax preparation is such a shady industry that even the IRS issues warnings. And even though the IRS requires a person who prepares a tax return for compensation to register with the agency, the IRS itself admits that such a person is not required to have any professional credentials.
AmeriCorps brings people of different backgrounds together for a positive mission—similar to another organization I’m familiar with. I worked with a highly talented group of people from California, Ohio, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. And many times we were our own marketing team, IT team and support group. That’s because we didn’t get paid a lot of money to do our jobs. But that was the point. AmeriCorps work is service work. It gets young people who could do any number of things into neighborhoods and communities that could use a bit of help.
And for me, AmeriCorps service brought me out of my comfort zone as I worked with kids and talked to people with different backgrounds. I got to recruit volunteers from local Memphis colleges to help us in our work. I experienced a variety of Memphis neighborhoods, from Crosstown to Orange Mound to Binghampton. In one instance, I helped with a taxpayer who spoke Arabic, and he and I used a translation app on his phone so we could communicate with each other.
A Worthwhile Endeavor
In April, the Trump administration decided to rip AmeriCorps apart by pulling nearly 33% of the agency’s budget. Thousands of AmeriCorps members were suddenly out of work, many of whom traveled across the country to serve their new community. Some of that funding has been restored, but it takes a lot of effort to build something and very little to break it.
For all the talk about saving the American people money by gutting this agency, I can tell you that the federal government cutting AmeriCorps is the equivalent of me deciding to save money by not spending $10. When you’re working with a budget of trillions of dollars, $1 billion doesn’t have much of an effect one way or the other.
You’ve then got to factor in Trump’s new fascination—a brand new battleship—that could be so expensive as to cover AmeriCorps’ budget and then some for the next 13 years. Congratulations on the money saved.
Perhaps a controversial opinion in this day and age, but putting young Americans to work in communities that can use some help is more patriotic than building a new weapon of war or saber-rattling with weapons of mass destruction. We should invest more in public service, not less.
AmeriCorps service was beneficial to me, and I know it is beneficial to others.
This MFP Voices opinion essay reflects the personal opinion of its author(s). The column does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.