After AmeriCorps cuts, MD officials responding to ‘subsistence-level challenges’

State officials said Wednesday that a central component of their response to the Trump administration’s cuts to AmeriCorps has been connecting members likely to face “subsistence-level challenges” to assistance for covering food and housing costs.

AmeriCorps members receive stipends comparable to poverty-level wages and they aren’t eligible for state unemployment insurance benefits. Those whose grants have been terminated have now been separated from their organizations and networks, officials said.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration abruptly placed 85% of the agency’s workforce on leave and announced plans to terminate roughly $400 million in grant programs, which prompted Maryland and 24 other states and Washington, D.C., to sue the Trump administration on Tuesday.

AmeriCorps is an independent federal agency that supports national and state service programs with funding and places volunteers in communities across the country. After the Trump administration’s recent order, more than 250 members in Maryland were immediately terminated, according to officials in the administration of Gov. Wes Moore.

Paul Monteiro, secretary of the Maryland Department of Service and Civic Innovation, said that the Trump administration notified his department Friday around 5 p.m. that many AmeriCorps grants would be canceled immediately.

“We had to start making calls Friday evening, into Saturday morning, to inform them (AmeriCorps members) of the immediate termination of their grants,” the secretary said in a virtual call Wednesday with reporters.

Monteiro’s department held a webinar with AmeriCorps members Monday evening to help connect them with support for food and housing, and state officials are hoping to connect some to other service assignments so they can qualify for the agency’s education award for repaying student loans or covering university or training program expenses.

The issue is personal for Monteiro, who said his family used a Montgomery County food bank powered by AmeriCorps volunteer members when he was a child. He would later go on to serve as the national director for the agency’s Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) anti-poverty program.

“These immediate and drastic cuts to AmeriCorps programs means that public lands will go untended, nonprofit organizations will lose critical bandwidth, classrooms across the state will have fewer caring adults to support the education of our students,” he said.

The Maryland Conservation Corps in the state’s natural resources department was among the larger Maryland programs canceled under the Trump administration’s cuts.

“If you’ve hiked on a trail, if you’ve gone to a bathroom in a state park, you most likely are touching a project that the Maryland Conservation Corps has done over the years,” Department of Natural Resources Secretary Josh Kurtz said during the call with reporters on Wednesday.

The recent AmeriCorps cuts have prompted Kurtz to shut down the program for this year, hindering a key career pipeline for the department and stripping support from projects in park services, forestry, fisheries, wildlife and heritage, and Chesapeake Bay and coastal services, among others.

Rachel Temby, who oversees the Maryland Conservation Corps program, said the Trump administration’s order meant that she and her team had to contact 41 members who were working at weekend events across the state to tell them to stop working immediately.

Despite having their AmeriCorps grants canceled, many of the program members returned to their events to help out as park volunteers, Temby said.

“I just want to underscore that these members truly are here to serve,” she said.