In the early summer of 2008, heavy flooding caused the Mississippi River to spill into towns along Iowa’s southeastern border. Thousands of people were evacuated from their homes, and hundreds of structures were submerged, with some estimates calculating the total cost of the destruction over $6 billion.
Over the next several months, national service members were called in to help rebuild the ravaged cities and towns and to set up temporary shelters.
“Where we’ve seen flooding or we’ve seen disasters, national service is typically one of the front lines that are coming and helping muck and gut and set up temporary emergency volunteer-run locations,” said Ashley Coffin, director of Green Iowa AmeriCorps, an environmental service program that was established in the wake of the catastrophic flooding to help prepare for potential future natural disasters.
Green Iowa AmeriCorps is based at the University of Northern Iowa’s Center for Energy and Environmental Education in Cedar Falls. In addition to the program's initial offerings of energy audits and other community outreach services, it now provides environmental youth education and critical land and water stewardship at 22 different host sites across the state.
AmeriCorps — the broader government organization that oversees the dispersion of federal grant funding for service work — places hundreds of thousands of workers at host sites across the country. AmeriCorps members typically serve 10- and 11-month contracts, earning a stipend of between $11 and $13 per hour, and in some cases much less.
Each year in Iowa, over 1,400 AmeriCorps members serve in the state’s 99 counties, according to the Iowa Commission on Volunteer Service. Chair Monica Chavez said members contribute more than 500,000 hours of community service on a yearly basis.
“Throughout my service on the commission, I’ve never failed to be humbled by the commitment, professionalism and dedication to service by all involved,” Chavez said.
But in late April, Iowa’s AmeriCorps grant recipients received word that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was considering cuts to the national service agency.
“I would say the first major concern that I think all of us felt was when we saw and heard that DOGE was within AmeriCorps, and we saw the termination of the NCCC program,” Coffin said.
AmeriCorps has three branches: VISTA, which focuses on capacity-building services in education and public health; NCCC, whose members specialize in disaster response; and AmeriCorps State and National programs, which address community needs. Uniquely, Iowa was home to host sites deploying members from all three branches, until DOGE cuts shuttered an NCCC office in Vinton in April.
Very quickly, those cuts extended from NCCC to the other two branches.
“You must immediately cease all award activities. This is a final agency action and is not administratively appealable,” read a notice dated April 29 from AmeriCorps to the state volunteer commission. The email had attached a spreadsheet detailing the fifteen AmeriCorps grant recipients whose funding would be cut.
Among them was the Iowa AmeriCorps 4H Outreach Program at Iowa State University, which lost over $640,000 in federal funds. Others included the Iowa Economic Development Authority ($520,525), the Conservation Corps for Iowa ($431,913) and the City of Davenport ($437,206).
In total, the cuts to all recipients were over $4.5 million and resulted in a loss of more than half of the state’s AmeriCorps members — 568 people.
Programs are now doing more with less
Chavez said the language around why some programs were cut over others was broad in the termination notice from the federal AmeriCorps corporation, stating only that certain awards no longer meet agency priorities.
Green Iowa was one of four grant recipients that survived the cuts. But Coffin said supporting the impacted members and their programs in the wake of the cuts has added to her workload. Now, she said she’s being required to do more with less.
"People are going to see and feel a lack of these resources that they have come to rely on.”Ashley Coffin, director of Green Iowa AmeriCorps
“As a program who wasn’t terminated, you’re trying to figure out how you can be helpful, how you can fill the gaps that are going to be even bigger now that some of your fellow programs are not going to be operational,” Coffin said.
Like Green Iowa, many of the other AmeriCorps programs were created to respond to environmental or civic issues that nobody had been addressing. National service is a gap-filling program by nature, Coffin said.
“There’s legalese in AmeriCorps that requires non-duplication, non-displacement — and for that reason, you often don’t have other staffing or other people who are intended to carry out this work,” she said. “It was meant for national service members, so when we remove them from service, these gaps are back in place.”
According to Coffin, those gaps will continue to reveal themselves in many ways — summer camps, lunch programs, conservation work, disaster prevention and community outreach. She added that there will be compounding impacts in rural communities.
“When you remove the people, you remove the programming that they were carrying out,” she said. “And so, people are going to see and feel a lack of these resources that they have come to rely on.”
AmeriCorps helped members ‘put down roots’ after moving to Iowa
At the Bur Oak Land Trust in Iowa City, AmeriCorps members were busy preserving native environmental habitats on property that was acquired through conservation easements. Workers conducted prescribed burns and removed invasive species of plants, with the aim of conserving the area’s natural growth.
Director Jason Taylor said many of the land trust’s members had moved to Iowa from out of state, sometimes from as far as Maryland and Colorado.
“With AmeriCorps, you’re reversing the trend in Iowa right now. You have so many young people leaving the state of Iowa to go do whatever after they graduate,” Taylor said. Indeed, Iowa has the ninth-highest rates of young, educated people leaving the state. “With the AmeriCorps program, we’ve been bringing them into Iowa.”
Taylor said after the members' contracts abruptly ended, they had to figure out what to do and where to go.
“They want to stay in Iowa. They want to continue doing this work. But unfortunately, they’re trying to figure out how that’s going to happen,” he said.
Across the state, at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory near Okoboji in northwest Iowa — a host site for both 4H Outreach and Green Iowa members — Director Mary Skopec said many AmeriCorps members who come from other states become attached to the communities they serve in and stay there after their contracts expire.
“Oftentimes, they’re looking to stay in the area. I think they come up here and they really enjoy what Iowa has to offer,” Skopec said. “And they may not stay in Okoboji, but oftentimes they’re staying in Iowa, working for other conservation organizations.”
Skopec said the Iowa Lakeside Lab joined AmeriCorps to help ameliorate the area’s need for conservation labor.
Roughly a quarter of Green Iowa’s members come from out of state. Fifteen years ago, it was half. Coffin said in the beginning, Green Iowa was one of relatively few environmental service programs, but over the years, more have popped up around the country.
But she said those who come from outside the state to serve in Iowa may feel more connected to the community they serve in than the one they left.
“We certainly, time and time again, have seen people who have really put down roots in the communities where they’ve served and started to build a life here in Iowa, even though they’re coming to us from Massachusetts or North Carolina,” Coffin said.
Members that made the cut say they ‘cannot trust anything’
The termination notice directed program leaders at impacted host sites to transfer their members whose contracts ended to a surviving program, if possible.
Kate Murray was one of those members. Previously, she was an outreach specialist for Iowa AmeriCorps 4H Outreach — an AmeriCorps program that projected serving 20,000 youth in after-school programs and summer camps in different parts of the state before the funding cuts. She served at the Iowa Lakeside Lab.
“They sent us a text on a Monday afternoon and said, ‘There might have been some cuts, but we don’t know how that will affect us. We’re going to tell you later today,’” Murray recalled. “Then they didn’t tell me, and I was like, if they have not told me by 5:00 p.m., I think that probably the cuts are bad news for me.”
Sure enough, when she went to work the next day, she saw an order asking her to stop working immediately.
“It was very stressful, because that was right when field trip season had started, so we were supposed to have kids coming pretty much every day for the next three weeks,” Murray said. “And it’s the sort of thing where, in education, you have to have everybody where you expect them to be, because you have to have a team to make sure things run smoothly.”
For a month, her plans for the pirate and survival camps she designed were up in the air.
“I was very stressed about the kids and about what that would mean for my future and where I would have to go,” Murray said.
But she was lucky. Since both 4H Outreach and Green Iowa AmeriCorps had members placed at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, she was able to keep her job under a new contract with Green Iowa AmeriCorps through administrative maneuvering. Pirate camp would live on.
“I’m kind of doing the same work as I was doing before, but technically under a different contract,” Murray said. “No one is totally certain exactly how it’s supposed to work, so we’re kind of figuring it out as we go.”
In Waterloo, AmeriCorps member Re Moe said she was getting ready for work when she saw a similar email asking her to stop working.
Moe served with the Refugee and Immigrant Youth Organization (RIYO), a nonprofit she co-founded in 2023 that helps immigrants and their families in the Cedar Valley attain their educational goals. A Thai immigrant herself, she joined AmeriCorps to help kickstart her career and finance her education.
“I’ve been an AmeriCorps supervisor as an AmeriCorps member,” Moe said. “[The program] gave me this opportunity, in a gap where I needed to develop my professional skills, and it helped me get to where I want to be in between.”
Even though she founded RIYO, Moe elected to serve there as an AmeriCorps member so she would be eligible for the Segal Education Award. The scholarship would have helped her go to graduate school at the University of Northern Iowa in the fall to become a school counselor. Now, she said she won’t be receiving the full award and is trying to determine how to pay for her education, which starts in August.
“I’m figuring out, for my first semester, what I’m going to do in my head right now,” Moe said. “I just don’t know what the next step is without AmeriCorps, at the moment.”
Moe said she was speechless when she received word of the cuts. AmeriCorps’ longevity and reputation were reasons she found the cuts to be so shocking.
“What we’re doing is really needed within the community,” Moe said. “I feel very upset, and I don’t know how to answer to the students who were not coming there for a couple of weeks. It’s hard to say to them, ‘We won’t be seeing you guys anymore.’”
She signed a contract directly with RIYO after 4H’s AmeriCorps grant funding was cut, which she said was funded through emergency dollars and other sources within the community. She was then able to sign a temporary contract through AmeriCorps Youth Connect that will end in August. She said after that, she doesn’t know how RIYO will be able to support her.
“I feel like I cannot trust anything,” Moe said. “The organizations and other sites are saying, ‘We’re going to figure this out, let’s see if we can do a transfer.' But then when we transfer, this contract is only left for a couple of weeks. So, it’s very temporary.”
Moe said she is being forced to consider other work to pay for her higher education.
“I do want to work in schools one day, as a school counselor helping young people to achieve,” she said. “I might not help them become rich, but somewhere, I want to make an impact to young people.”
Residual effects of cuts to be felt for ‘quite a while’
In many cases, it’s now up to the host sites that previously welcomed a crew of AmeriCorps members to continue to finance their work — if they haven’t paused it indefinitely.
The Iowa Lakeside Lab had to cut back its half a dozen summer members who usually help with youth education. It also lost a third of its leadership during its busiest season.
Polk County Conservation in Des Moines eliminated at least five positions, including a coordinating role.
“Previously planned conservation work or public programming may need to be canceled or put on the back burner as we shuffle staff assignments to cover the new gaps,” said Executive Director Richard Leopold in a statement. “There will be ripple effects and it will impact the way we serve the public and the way we care for public lands.”
"There will be ripple effects and it will impact the way we serve the public and the way we care for public lands.”Richard Leopold, executive director of Polk County Conservation
However, local fundraising efforts allowed eight members to finish their contracts at local nonprofits and agencies in Davenport, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters and Davenport Parks and Recreation.
In Iowa City, the Bur Oak Land Trust had its AmeriCorps grants restored after a federal judge in Maryland ruled against the cuts.
But Coffin with Green Iowa said one residual impact of the cuts is the message they send to young people considering doing service work.
“Our job should really be, as a country, to be engaging and inspiring our young people, connecting them to the community, giving them skills and networks and resources to be thriving members of our society,” Coffin said. “So, what is this message telling them when we’re removing those opportunities so unceremoniously, and leaving them with nothing?”
Last month, a federal district court judge in Maryland ruled that the funding cuts were a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act and ordered the federal government to restore AmeriCorps funding in the 24 states involved in the lawsuit.
Iowa was not one of those states.
“Everyone should feel outraged that programs like this, and people like this are not being given the opportunity to serve their country in the way that they had set out to,” Coffin said. “And we’re going to feel the ripple effects of this rug kind of being pulled out from under each of us for quite a while.”
