As a part of the #SaveAmeriCorps Road Trip, I had an opportunity to learn from Juan Hurtado-Rodriguez, who directs the AmeriCorps program at Safe Passages in Oakland — one of the most community-rooted programs I’ve seen in this work.
He told me about a young man who had grown up in Oakland’s public schools. He’d faced housing instability for a long time. No steady income. No place to call his own.
Then he joined AmeriCorps.
He didn’t just show up to serve — he poured himself into the work. Tutoring. Mentoring. Helping students in the very schools he once attended. AmeriCorps gave him structure, income, and a purpose. And finally, just weeks ago, he got his first apartment.
And then — the program was cut.
Not because it failed.
Not because it didn’t deliver results.
But because of a top-down decision from Washington that ignored what was efficiently working on the ground.
Let me be blunt: This young man didn’t need a handout. He needed a shot. And AmeriCorps gave it to him.
And then the shot disappeared without warning — for him, for his students, and for every family depending on these services to keep classrooms calm, kids learning, and emerging local leaders growing into their future careers.
We talk a lot in this country about bootstraps. This program is a pair of boots. It’s giving people the tools to stand up, show up, and serve the community with dignity.
And it’s being cut.
The Bigger Threat Behind the Story
What happened in Oakland is just one local example of a much bigger problem unfolding nationwide.
The Trump administration’s proposed FY26 budget includes a 73% cut to AmeriCorps. It requests just enough funding to shut the agency down — not to strengthen it. They’ve made it clear: they want to “return responsibility for national service to the private and nonprofit sectors.”
Except guess what — national service was never funded by the private and nonprofit sectors. It’s a myth, a lie — a tragic call-back to 1980s Washington leadership who talked about returning mental health care for our poorest citizens to nonprofits and local government. Did that “return” actually happen? No.
But it gets worse: this year, in FY25, OMB is planning to illegally set aside nearly $200 million of Congress-appropriated funds for AmeriCorps.
That’s funding meant to support local programs — many of them currently up for renewal — across 34 states. If those dollars are withheld, thousands of schools, students, and communities will lose critical services while 18,000 AmeriCorps members and 6,000 older adult volunteers will be left without positions they want to fill.
That’s what makes the story of the Safe Passages member so painful: he’s not the exception. He’s the warning.
We Know This Works. Let’s Not Walk Away.
AmeriCorps isn’t charity. It’s strategy. It’s a workforce development engine, a classroom stabilizer, a ladder for people who want to serve and grow.
Cutting it — or quietly letting it fade — doesn’t just hurt programs. It tells communities, “We don’t think you know what you need” while undermining the very people who are holding communities together.
We need to fund what works — programs built by and for local communities, not dictated by Washington.
This isn’t the time for shutdown budgets or unexplained “undistributed” funds.
It’s time to stand with the people doing the work — because no one knows what a community needs better than the community itself.
AmeriCorps turns that local knowledge into lasting impact.
Let’s not quietly lose one of the best things government got right.