Team leader Madeleine Benson chainsawing tree limbs that fell in a front yard in Valdosta, Georgia. (Courtesy of Madeleine Benson)
When Madeleine Benson, a Roswell native, withdrew from the University of Maryland during her junior year, she was burned out and looking for a fresh start.
The 22-year-old wanted to give back to the community and learn skills to help her decide on her future career. She found that in an extensive, but somewhat unknown, federal program called AmeriCorps.
“It was an opportunity to really expand my horizons and dabble in different positions, while still being provided housing, a living stipend, and food. So you’re given that flexibility to explore different career options, while still having some kind of safety net,” said Benson.
Most corps members are young adults, sometimes fresh out of high school, who volunteer full-time and commit to months or years of service, living on just a few dollars a day. Many are sent to communities that desperately need help.
So after Hurricane Helene devastated cities and towns in Georgia last September, AmeriCorps members like Benson were sent to help.
But last month, federal cuts to AmeriCorps triggered a quick and sweeping demobilization that sent tens of thousands serving across the country home before the end of their service term.
Advocates say the move hurts communities, which are losing valuable volunteers, but also the corps members who are now scrambling to find work and housing.
And now, the entire future of the over 30-year-old service program is in question.
“You’re not doing this for the money. You know, my corps members made roughly $5 an hour doing the work they did, and they worked hard. We worked really hard.”
Madeleine Benson, former AmeriCorps member
Kristen Bennett, CEO of the nonprofit Service Year Alliance, said programs like AmeriCorps provide a “triple bottom line.”
“With every service year, there’s the opportunity to transform the life of the person who’s serving, to strengthen the community by delivering critical services, while also fueling civic renewal in America,” Bennett said.
AmeriCorps has a budget of about $1.3 billion annually and is funded through a public-private partnership. It is the successor to initiatives like the Peace Corps and the Civil Conservation Corps. And it has historically enjoyed consistent bipartisan support.
Around 65,000 people participate in AmeriCorps annually, filtered into a few different models, according to Bennett.
Benson joined the National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) as a team leader last year for an 11-month service term. She and her team would be deployed for short stints in Rhode Island, Alabama and Louisiana.
In November, she landed in Valdosta to help clear debris left by Hurricane Helene.
The Category 4 hurricane killed 37 people in Georgia and caused over $5 billion just in agricultural damages.
“Get up at 6 a.m., leave by like 7:30, get to these homes, and then you’re just chainsawing all day,” Benson said, explaining a typical day on the job.
Most of the work NCCC members do is physically demanding. In Georgia, they were assigned to “mucking and gutting,” removing dirt and debris from inside a home, and “swamping,” moving tree limbs and other trash to where trucks can pick it up.
Corps Member Jaden Briggs (left) assists with removing a tree that fell on a resident’s garage in Valdosta, Georgia. (Courtesy of Madeleine Benson)
Data from AmeriCorps NCCC shows the last team deployed to Georgia landed in Vidalia in January and stayed through the end of February.
Josh Beck, Vidalia’s city manager, recalled when Hurricane Helene hit the community of 11,000 people.
“It was just a catastrophic event,” he said.
As one of the bigger cities in the area, Vidalia is usually the one to help more rural communities, he added. But now, Vidalia needed help.
“We’ve gotten about 3 million cubic yards of debris off our right-of-ways,” he said. “The county as a whole spent over $60 million just on debris.”
Getting Vidalia’s streets clear again was one of the missions given to Jack Grunst and his team. He was the leader of the group deployed to Vidalia.
Originally from Colorado, the 26-year-old joined NCCC after graduating from Montana State University. He spent time working in restaurants before deciding to pivot to the nonprofit world and saw AmeriCorps as a way to do it.
“Help out a bunch of different organizations to figure out what I ultimately want to do,” he said, “and also experience more of the country than just one new place.”
That’s another upside of the program, said Bennett. It’s an opportunity to bring people together across differences, something she said “our country desperately needs right now.”
Beck said the corps members helped inspire and energize the community as it recovered from Hurricane Helene.
“AmeriCorps would knock on the door, and they’re saying, ‘We’re here to help you,’” Beck said. “It’s hard to believe. Perfectly remote people from other states are coming to help you, and they’re doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.”
Like Benson, Grunst worked on debris removal for people who couldn’t afford to have broken branches and downed trees professionally removed from their property.
He said many were waiting for a while.
Team leader Jack Grunst (far right) preparing for a day on the job while deployed in Georgia. (Courtesy of Jack Grunst)
“They would have signed up like three, four months before [for assistance] and they didn’t hear back until our team got there,” Grunst said.
The NCCC team also helped catalogue damage to the city so the local government could submit for FEMA reimbursement. Beck said they left the city “a whole lot cleaner.”
“They were great kids. They were young. They’re green,” he said. “But they’re helping.”
Beck said there’s no doubt in his mind Vidalia could have gotten back on its feet on its own, but it would have been a slower road to recovery. And AmeriCorps would be welcomed back, he added, if the city ever needed that assistance again.
Grunst called Vidalia one of his favorite places where he was deployed, because of the direct impact he made.
As a Georgian, Benson said she was proud to serve in her home state. She remembered helping people who didn’t have much, but who would offer her and her teammates a meal, like fried chicken, while on the job.
“It was often people that had really no resources to get rid of this destruction. It was like veterans that we were helping or people with disabilities,” she said.
“AmeriCorps would knock on the door, and they’re saying, ‘We’re here to help you.’ It’s hard to believe. Perfectly remote people from other states are coming to help you, and they’re doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.”
Josh Beck, Vidalia city manager
Then, on April 15, while serving in her last deployment in Asheville, North Carolina, Benson was brought into an urgent meeting. That’s when a supervisor said she and her team would have to pack their belongings, leave their site immediately, and return to the southern region campus in Vicksburg, Mississippi. From there, they’d be returned to their address of record.
Grunst had a similar experience that same day. His team was serving in Massachusetts when they got the news, launching them into a three-day drive back to an empty campus.
“So by the time we got there Friday afternoon, everybody was gone,” he said.
Both teams were just 30 days shy of their AmeriCorps graduation.
Benson recalled telling her teammates the news.
“There were a lot tears and confusion, and I had to be very upfront with them in the fact that I have no answers and my boss, our unit leaders have no answers,” Benson said.
But the corps members would quickly get a clearer picture of what was happening.
In a letter to NCCC members obtained by WABE, “in alignment with the Trump-Vance Administration priorities,” AmeriCorps NCCC would be working within new parameters that would impact its ability to sustain operations. In short, NCCC was demobilizing immediately.
Corps members would be placed on administrative leave until April 30, keeping their pay and benefits until that date.
They would also receive a prorated educational award out of the full $7,395, as long as they completed 15% of their service. While not an issue for Benson or Grunst, corps members who had just started recently would be out of luck.
Bennett said organization leaders were expecting cuts, but not so sweeping. The Trump administration cut $400 million in grants that supported nearly 33,000 AmeriCorps members and senior volunteers, she added.
The move swiftly halved the number of AmeriCorps members serving across the country, including sending home every one of the roughly 750 NCCC members.
“The effects of the cuts are immediate and long-lasting,” Bennett said.
The public largely doesn’t know about AmeriCorps or how it works, Bennett added, because corps members typically work through local nonprofits that rely on foot traffic from the program.
“But I guarantee that they are going to know that there’s no longer someone there offering the literacy tutoring to their child,” she said. “They’re going to wonder why food bank shelves are empty.”
Bennett called the program the country’s best-kept secret, with proven success.
“For every federal dollar, every taxpayer dollar spent on AmeriCorps, communities in our country receive at least $17 in a return on investment. So this is a good deal for our communities. It’s good for our government,” she said.
But tens of thousands of former corps members are now looking for work. Since housing is sometimes provided, they might also be looking for homes.
She said it’s unclear whether the nonprofit sector can absorb all these people, including roughly 85% of the permanent staff who operate AmeriCorps, who have been fired or put on administrative leave.
“For every federal dollar, every taxpayer dollar spent on AmeriCorps, communities in our country receive at least $17 in a return on investment. So this is a good deal for our communities. It’s good for our government.”
Kristen Bennett, CEO of Service Year Alliance
That makes the program’s future unclear. Now would be when AmeriCorps would be recruiting new people.
“So not only are we having to deal with sending the current Corps members home, there is uncertainty around whether or not what Congress has appropriated for AmeriCorps is going to actually lead to grant decisions being made and individuals being mobilized next year,” she said.
AmeriCorps did not respond to WABE’s questions about future cohorts, but the link to its application remains online.
Benson said it was challenging to go home without saying goodbye to the people who shaped, as she puts it, the hardest year of her life.
She also feels dismissed by her government.
“This is not us extending taxpayer dollars into outside countries. This is boots-on-the-ground ground work in American cities and communities that need our help, that are often underrepresented and overlooked by the people in power,” she said. “You’re not doing this for the money. You know, my corps members made roughly $5 an hour doing the work they did, and they worked hard. We worked really hard.”
Grunst said he felt “disappointed and disgusted” with the decision.
“People don’t choose AmeriCorps for the money or anything like that, they do it because they want to make connections and they want to help build and restore communities,” he said.
Now, Benson plans to finish her degree at Kennesaw State University with the skills she learned in AmeriCorps. She hopes to work in nonprofit management or human relations one day.
Grunst isn’t sure himself. He was planning on doing summer service with NCCC, which he said has now been canceled. He says he will likely look for a service job in the meantime. But he would love to move from Colorado to the South, which he fell in love with during his service year. And he says he’s hopeful AmeriCorps will survive.
Despite all that has happened, Benson said, her experience was invaluable. It taught her to lead with empathy and see the bigger picture.
“I think I don’t regret doing AmeriCorps at all,” she said. “I find my outlook on life has changed drastically with AmeriCorps. I am so motivated to give back to the community.”
