After Trump Gutted AmeriCorps, How Do Bay Area Nonprofits Move Forward?

Scores of Bay Area nonprofits are scrambling after hundreds of AmeriCorps staff members who filled crucial support roles were abruptly terminated last month, amid sweeping cuts to the national service program.

The workers, who are paid a modest monthly stipend to work on education, anti-poverty and disaster recovery initiatives in low-income communities, received notice from the program in late April instructing them not to come back in the next day.

“The note was essentially like, ‘Don’t report to work tomorrow,’” said Bita Nazarian, executive director of 826 Valencia, whose youth centers in San Francisco’s Mission, Tenderloin and Mission Bay neighborhoods offer free writing workshops and tutoring to low-income students.

The nonprofit, co-founded by Bay Area novelist Dave Eggers, has for years relied on 15 AmeriCorps members to lead the tutoring services that form the core of its mission to provide students with the kind of individualized academic support they often don’t receive in school.

Although 826 Valencia scraped together funds to continue paying AmeriCorps members through July, when their terms were set to end, Nazarian said she isn’t sure if they can afford to do so for future cohorts.

“We’re paying our people from our own budget just to maintain our programs and keep them whole,” she said. “They had committed to us, so I felt committed to them.”

But many other organizations don’t have the financial leeway to do that, Nazarian said. She described a recent call with other local nonprofits in which a number said they couldn’t continue paying their AmeriCorps members.

“People were freaking out,” she said. “How do you deliver the services that you have committed to delivering without your people?”

A domestic version of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps was created three decades ago to foster public service and volunteerism, primarily drawing young people fresh out of college.

“These are people who are signing up to help their own country, because we have needs, there’s gaps to be filled,” said Adolfo Rivera, the director of national service programs at Bay Area Community Resources. “People always think that the way to serve the country is the military. But there are other ways too.”

Rivera’s nonprofit manages AmeriCorps programs in about 30 educational and disaster relief organizations in the region — including 826 Valencia. He had the unfortunate job of informing the roughly 600 AmeriCorps members he oversees that their positions had been cut, effective immediately.

That included a group that was dispatched to Los Angeles after the devastating January wildfires and has been there since to help with recovery efforts.

“I think that one to me is almost the most heartbreaking,” said Rivera, who’s been involved with AmeriCorps since the agency’s inception in 1994. “These folks lived in hotels for months, serving people at their lowest moments, not making a lot of money, and then get an email saying the federal government has cut your grant. That their service was no longer needed or wanted.”

Even after watching the Trump administration ransack other government agencies, Rivera said he never expected AmeriCorps, a program that has always garnered bipartisan support, to be on the chopping block.

“It’s in red states, it’s in blue states. It’s in rural counties, it’s in urban counties,” he said. “AmeriCorps is everywhere.”

The disruption to AmeriCorps comes after the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency on April 25 quietly ordered the national service agency to cancel nearly $400 million in grants — about 40% of its remaining funding — which paid for its members’ stipends, health care and education awards.

“It has been determined that the award no longer meets agency priorities and you must immediately cease all award activities,” AmeriCorps wrote in an email on April 27 to national and regional organizations that help distribute grant funding, according to communications shared with KQED. “This is a final agency action, and it is not administratively appealable.”

The cuts have already prompted a number of local nonprofits to scale back or fully suspend their services, including some garden programs in San Francisco schools that AmeriCorps members primarily staff.

Across the country, the sudden termination could shutter more than 1,000 programs and cut short the terms of over 32,000 service members, who will immediately lose their health care benefits and only receive a percentage of the education grants they had been promised, according to America’s Service Commissions, a nonprofit organization that helps support AmeriCorps programs.

AmeriCorps did not respond to KQED’s request for comment.

Several states, including California, which has long been one of the biggest recipients of the AmeriCorps grants, had their entire funding cut, ASC said.

Within days, California joined more than 20 other states in suing the Trump administration over the cut, calling it “an unauthorized decision by the administration to dismantle” an agency that was formed, and is funded, by Congress.

In a separate lawsuit, filed more than a month before the cuts were announced, the San Francisco Unified School District and the city of Santa Fe also sued the administration for making AmeriCorps funding contingent on compliance with its anti-DEI policy agenda — an action that a court order temporarily blocked.

While DOGE and the Trump administration say they are seeking to root out wasteful government spending, Rivera said that what’s often misunderstood about AmeriCorps is that it relies on matching funds from private donors and the states, and is only partially funded by the federal government.

“For an administration that’s talking about making cuts to increase efficiency and decrease waste, there is no world where AmeriCorps should be part of that equation,” said Eddie Kaufman, the executive director of Mission Graduates, an education equity organization in San Francisco that until last month hosted five AmeriCorps members. “These are people who are stepping up to be a part of their community, to give their time, to give their energy, and get paid very little to do it.”

Kaufman said he can only think that the purge is part of the administration’s ongoing assault on institutions it considers even remotely related to DEI initiatives.

“AmeriCorps members are working in so many under-resourced communities and communities of color. And this administration doesn’t want to recognize that there’s additional needs that those communities have,” he said. “And so this is a way to level the playing field from their perspective, by taking out these supports that are really targeted to the communities that need it most.”