Tough Times for National Service

Charities remain wary after cutsmade in AmeriCorps program

When torrential rains caused flooding in Skagit County, Wash., in October, the state’s Emergency Management

Division called the local Conservation Corps seeking the aid of dozens of AmeriCorps volunteers as it had in past disasters to help sandbag and carry out other relief efforts.

But Rob Spath, the state environmental group’s program director, had some bad news: He had no AmeriCorps members to offer. The Washington Conservation Corps — which for the previous nine years had annually placed up to 150 AmeriCorps members at environmental charities around the state — had been turned down for the $1.5-million national-service grant it had requested in 2003. That meant the organization had no AmeriCorps members starting last fall who could spend 40 hours a week on such chores as planting trees, cleaning up streams, and maintaining trails. It also meant no ready crew to respond to natural disasters, like the October flood.

“We’re very, very frustrated,” Mr. Spath says. The state’s emergency-management office”came to rely on us,” he says,”and all of a sudden we had nothing.”

Like hundreds of other organizations around the country, Mr. Spath’s group was a victim of massive reductions last year at AmeriCorps. Last summer, the program, a sort of domestic Peace Corps, approved about 30,000 new positions, far short of the nearly 70,000 okayed the previous year. A major reason for the decline was that AmeriCorps approved thousands more volunteer positions than it had money for in 2002, which cut sharply into money available for slots in 2003.

Many observers say poor accounting and mismanagement at AmeriCorps, as well as political wrangling between members of Congress and the Bush administration, contributed to the cuts. In addition, part of the trouble stemmed from disagreements between two federal agencies over how much money AmeriCorps had to keep in reserve to cover future payments to service members. In 2002, Congress decided against adding any new money to cover such costs.

Whatever the reasons behind last year’s losses, however, many charities are still reeling from the shortfalls, even as Congress deliberates a 2004 spending bill that includes a record-size budget for the national-service program. And while many charity leaders remain hopeful that new leadership at the agency that oversees AmeriCorps, as well as new accounting rules and enrollment procedures, will help the program avoid a repeat of last year’s troubles, concerns remain about the lingering effects of 2003.

“It’s like running a company,” says Marsha Meeks Kelly, executive director of the Mississippi Commission for Volunteer Services.”You can’t stop one day and let all your employees go and leave your customers hanging, and then think that one magical day you’ll open your doors back up and everything will be as it was. It’s going to take time and effort for groups to rebound from the devastation.”

She adds:”Even if money is available again after the budget passes, grantees that were not funded in 2003 will have to rebuild infrastructures, partnerships, and trust to make it work again.”

David Eisner, who last month took over as chief executive officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal entity that oversees AmeriCorps, acknowledges that last year was”enormously frustrating and painful.” But, he says, AmeriCorps is now well-positioned to recover and grow. Among the positive indicators, he says: the 2004 budget plan, rising national interest in volunteerism, and support for the program from President Bush, who has said he hopes AmeriCorps can sponsor 75,000 new volunteers this year.

“All that together signals we are at a unique moment of opportunity,” says Mr. Eisner, a former executive at both the AOL division of Time Warner and the company’s charitable foundation.

300,000 Members

Since its creation in 1993, more than 300,000 AmeriCorps volunteers have fanned out to nonprofit groups large and small around the country to participate in a range of activities, such as cleaning rivers and other wild areas, building low-cost housing, and running after-school programs. Volunteers, who may spend up to two years in the program, receive small stipends for their service, along with a scholarship of almost $5,000 for each year in the program to use for college or to pay off student loans.

Nearly every year since its start, spending on the program has triggered hostilities in Congress, especially among some Republican lawmakers who dislike the idea of government paying people to volunteer, and of giving charities what they see as another federal handout. Some observers blame the Congressional tug-of-war over AmeriCorps for exacerbating what otherwise might have been minor accounting problems last year, and for unfairly withholding money from the program.

Last summer, Congress passed legislation to make more funds available for AmeriCorps by easing the requirements for how much money the agency must set aside in a trust fund to cover the education awards. But Congress rejected a plan to provide additional funds for the program to help avert the 2003 cuts in the number of people who could join AmeriCorps. Nonprofit organizations apply for money from the agency, then recruit volunteers to fill as many positions as they can afford. Most AmeriCorps members start their year of work in the summer or early fall.

Not all charities lost members last year, but many of those that did have been scrambling to cover their losses. Many have stepped up fund-raising efforts, and applied for other federal, state, and local grants in hopes of finding some money to keep on at least a few AmeriCorps members. Others have tried to fill the gaps with college interns or other kinds of volunteers. Still others, unable to make up for the personnel deficit, have gutted services or shuttered programs altogether.

A domestic-violence shelter in Saginaw, Mich., no longer runs a 15-week course in local schools on violence prevention and how to nurture healthy relationships with family members, friends, and partners.

A California social-services charity stopped offering tutoring services to children of Hispanic farm workers, and dropped a program intended to help their parents get more involved in their kids’ education. The group previously had about 20 AmeriCorps workers a year to provide those services.

A Buffalo, N.Y., high school, with hundreds of foreign-born students who have little or no formal education, is unable this year to offer those students the special tutoring and counseling that AmeriCorps volunteers had provided, sometimes in the students’ native languages.

A Mississippi organization that provides services to people with disabilities is struggling to keep up with its clients’ critical needs. A 65-year-old woman who is wheelchair-bound called the organization in September, for example, and is still on a waiting list to have a ramp built at the entrance to her home.

“We would have had supplies and volunteers to build it within a week,” says Margie Moore, a program director at the Jackson, Miss., organization, Living Independence for Everyone.”Now there is only so much we can do.”

The same message is often heard at the Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association, a Bellingham, Wash., group that works to restore salmon habitats. Hobbled by the loss of its 15 AmeriCorps members last fall, the group is trying to make do with three volunteers whose stipends are being paid for with a county grant.

The grant runs out at the end of next month, though, and the group is rushing to raise money elsewhere. The challenge, says its executive director, Wendy Scherrer, is that it must plant the 35,000 trees it had hoped for before April, when planting season ends and contracts with some landowners — who agreed to add vegetation to their land to help protect adjacent waterways — expire.

To meet its goal, Nooksack has been running planting parties on the weekends to encourage new volunteers to join their efforts. But, says Ms. Scherrer, it doesn’t make up for the loss of AmeriCorps members.

“Other people don’t have the same time to give,” she says.”The projects are physically demanding. AmeriCorps kids get technical training, learn safety regulations. They know how to do the work.”

Ms. Scherrer would like to raise $80,000 by the end of the month — a tall task for an organization that typically raises a total of about $150,000 a year from private sources. She has applied for grants from other government agencies, and made appeals to donors, foundations, and local businesses. Board members are planning to make phone calls to donors urging them to help.

Stepping Up Fund Raising

Other groups are intensifying fund raising, too.

The West Seneca Youth Bureau, in New York, has 34 AmeriCorps volunteers this year, compared with about 225 in each of the last few years. The bureau places the volunteers around western New York at nonprofit organizations that work to feed the hungry, renew urban areas, and provide other services.

The organization is appealing to foundations to help raise as much as $400,000 so it can field more volunteers. It is aiming to earn an additional $80,000 through a variety of fund-raising efforts, including one in which the local professional ice-hockey team, the Buffalo Sabres, is pitching in. During the team’s home games, West Seneca sells raffle tickets to fans, who can win prizes, including dinner with a player or a ride on a Zamboni machine. So far, ticket sales have netted $4,000.

But money is not the group’s only concern.

Mark Lazarra, West Seneca’s executive director, frets about the diminished services at the charities that had counted on AmeriCorps members, and he worries about their ability to rejoin the program even if it returns to full financial strength this year. Together, the 70 charities with which West Seneca placed AmeriCorps participants each year raised about $500,000 annually to match the federal grant and help pay for administrative costs.

“They were lining up a lot of money and making a lot of plans, then we had to bail,” Mr. Lazarra says.”Some groups are thinking twice about getting involved with us again because AmeriCorps feels like a roller coaster sometimes. You can’t put together funds, staff, and programs one year, get rid of it all the next, then just have it ready to go again.”

That is part of the sentiment behind the San Francisco Conservation Corps’s decision not to reapply for AmeriCorps money this year. The group, which counsels and trains troubled youth and then matches them with service projects, withdrew its 2003 application for AmeriCorps funds in May when it was still uncertain whether it would get the money for the 20 or so participants the organization had had during each of the past seven years.

“If we were going to lose the money, we had to make serious programmatic shifts by July 1,” when the group’s fiscal year began, says Ann Cochrane, executive director of the San Francisco Conservation Corps. She says that potential volunteers needed to make their own plans for the year, too.

“We had kids from all over the country asking, ‘Am I coming? Am I enrolled? Am I not?’” Ms. Cochrane says.

‘Frustrating Process’

While plenty of other organizations are expected to stay away from AmeriCorps this year, too, many more appear ready to give it another go.

“It’s a fabulous program if you can get it,” says Judy Azulay, grants coordinator of Monroe County Schools, in West Virginia, which applied for AmeriCorps money for the first time last year, and was turned down.”Are we going to try for the opportunity again? Absolutely. Is it a frustrating process at this point? Yes.”

Ms. Azulay says one of the troubling aspects is the uncertainty about the criteria for grant applications this year, especially the requirements for organizations to raise matching funds from other sources.

The rules now require groups that receive AmeriCorps money to supply at least 15 percent of the total cost of sponsoring service members, plus one-third of other costs to run the volunteer program.

But, taking direction from Congress to re-examine its grant guidelines, the Corporation for National and Community Service is on the verge of reconsidering its rules, including changes to the matching-grant requirements and consideration of whether the same organizations ought to be allowed to receive grants year after year. No term limits for federal support are in place now.

Tougher rules, say Ms. Azulay and other observers, would be especially hard on small nonprofit groups or those located in impoverished areas, where it is difficult to raise money from other sources.

“The rules on matching and sustainability, whatever they are, will set a course for where AmeriCorps programs will be housed,” says Cathy Grace, director of the Early Childhood Institute at Mississippi State University.”If more and more matching is required, for instance, it would push programs out of rural areas, where there is not a big resource base, and to bigger and bigger nonprofits.”

Preserving Flexibility

The corporation’s Mr. Eisner says the goal is to make the new rules flexible enough”to avoid a situation where we are disadvantaging the very programs that need a greater advantage.”

He says he looks forward to the rule-making process, which is likely to include public hearings and other open discussions, because it will help engage people involved in national service on critical issues. Recognition of the need for that kind of coming together, Mr. Eisner says, is one of the positive outcomes of last year’s tribulations.

Many observers agree that the crisis has galvanized national-service proponents. Another silver lining, they say, is increased public awareness of AmeriCorps.

A couple of hundred charities joined together in a coalition called Save AmeriCorps to lobby Congress and advocate for national service in general. And countless news-media reports about the stress the loss of AmeriCorps volunteers created for local charities piqued interest in the program among people who may not have even heard of it before.

“People gained a new appreciation for the opportunities the funding makes possible,” says David Muraki, interim executive director of GoServ, a California agency that oversees volunteerism efforts in the state.

Still, serious challenges lie ahead, including, some observers say, the annual struggle over how much money Congress will approve for AmeriCorps.

“It is a very useful program,” says Jon Van Til, a professor of urban studies and community planning at Rutgers University’s Camden campus.”But it is a political football, and this year-to-year jousting I expect to see continuing well into the 21st century.