A Dwindling Corps

Anticipated slash in AmeriCorps enrollment could prove dire for charities that rely on the program

Last year, President Bush visited a member of the AmeriCorps national service program at a community-policing project in St. Petersburg, Fla., to thank her for saving a child’s life. This year, that program is among hundreds facing possible extinction as AmeriCorps, a key component of the president’s agenda of “compassionate conservatism,” drastically reduces enrollment nationwide from 72,000 last year to possibly as few as 13,000.

Nonprofit groups across the nation were shocked by the magnitude of the cuts, which AmeriCorps began announcing last week.

The steep reduction stems in part from a dispute between the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the General Accounting Office, Congress’s investigative arm, over how much cash should be kept in a trust fund to provide AmeriCorps members with the $4,725 education grant they are guaranteed in exchange for completing a year of full-time service.

The General Accounting Office said AmeriCorps should keep the entire sum available, while the White House budget office said that was unnecessary since about 20 percent of those enrolled don’t use the education money. AmeriCorps officials are still attempting to negotiate the figure with administration officials and with Congress, which limited the number of AmeriCorps participants this year because of budget problems.

Although final numbers for AmeriCorps enrollment probably won’t be announced until later this summer, the size of the cuts became clear when the agency that oversees AmeriCorps announced that it had provided money to 53 groups, supporting about 3,000 AmeriCorps members, down from the 255 groups and 16,000 participants the agency approved last year.

What the Cuts Would Do

Charities that depend on AmeriCorps members say their programs would be devastated. Many groups rely on members of the service program to take the place of paid employees. Charities that employ AmeriCorps workers would otherwise have to pay salaries to people to teach students in low-performing schools, tutor children, staff food banks and homeless shelters, help police communities, and run after-school programs.

Many say they could never afford to hire employees to replace AmeriCorps members, because the national-service workers receive a $9,500 stipend from the federal government, and charities only need to pay such expenses as health care.

Habitat for Humanity trains its AmeriCorps workers as site leaders, enabling them to marshal the armies of willing but inexperienced volunteers who show up to construct homes for the needy at night and on weekends. Without those site leaders, the total number of homes built could fall by more than a third, says Christen Schaefer Wiggins, Habitat’s director of national service programs. “Without a site leader, it can be chaos at a build site,” she says. “AmeriCorps members come in, they know what they’re doing, they make sure everybody’s productive and not just standing around.” Habitat surveyed its affiliates and found that they plan to build 921 homes this year; the number would fall to 574 without AmeriCorps.

“We would have to look for other full-time help, either volunteer or paid,” says Beth Van Gorp, volunteer coordinator for Habitat’s Charlotte, N.C., affiliate. Habitat doesn’t have the budget to hire enough replacements, she says, and many volunteers are retired. “Most AmeriCorps members are younger, and they’re not daunted by physical challenges, like digging out footings or hauling scaffolding. They do the hard, dirty work,” she says.

The cutbacks have some organizations competing against one another for AmeriCorps members. AmeriCorps Pinellas, the community-policing program visited by President Bush, aids the police departments of Clearwater, St. Petersburg, and Pinellas County. It is vying with other groups in the state to get its share of the reduced number of AmeriCorps participants. One possibility is that each program will receive three or four AmeriCorps participants — not enough to keep up the Pinellas program, which last year had 28 AmeriCorps members, says the program director, Lawrence Moose. The cost of administering the program remains the same whether it has three AmeriCorps members or 30, he says, and the police departments, which pay to support AmeriCorps members, would balk if they are only getting one national-service worker each.

Criticism of Bush

News of the steep reductions was particularly surprising to many in the nonprofit world since President Bush has asked Congress to increase the number of volunteers to 75,000. A number of AmeriCorps supporters criticize the president for standing by earlier this year as Congress slashed the group’s budget to $175-million and said its annual membership could not exceed 50,000. Administration officials say Mr. Bush asked Congress to get rid of the limit on enrollment and to increase funds.

Supporters of AmeriCorps said they were heartened when three senators this month introduced a bill that calls for AmeriCorps to grow in size to 175,000 members, although it would not provide the money to do that.

Two other senators plan to introduce separate legislation that would allow AmeriCorps to follow the White House budget-office guidelines on its trust fund rather than those approved by the General Accounting Office. Some 250 charities have joined a coalition to lobby for money to help AmeriCorps enroll more participants this year.

Gene Sofer, a Washington consultant for service programs who organized the coalition, says charities may have learned an important lesson from the experience about the need to lobby.

“What this has demonstrated is that proponents of national service need to be organized just the same way everybody else is,” he says. “We’ve learned that lesson painfully, but we are learning it. We need to work together to grow the pot.”

Still, the uncertainty about the funds for AmeriCorps is already taking its toll on charities’ ability to attract and keep AmeriCorps workers.

Lynette Kraber, an AmeriCorps member who works at Habitat for Humanity in Charlotte, N.C., says she has loved the year she spent at Habitat and would like to stay for a second year.

But she doesn’t have enough money to wait indefinitely for work, she says. “It’s at a point where if I was offered something else, I would have to take it. I have to be employed.”