When Oliver Borchers-Williams was wrapping up his undergrad during the pandemic, he had offers on the table that would have taken him to New York, Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles.
Instead, the North Dakota-born, Minnesota-bred graduate moved to Nebraska for a public service fellowship that put him to work on broadband access across 16 counties, some of which have fewer than 5,000 residents. Over the next two years that he served as an AmeriCorps-funded fellow in the American Connection Corps program, Borchers-Williams aided in turning a $4 million American Rescue Plan Act allocation into an $11 million investment and ultimately brought broadband to thousands of homes. Today, he’s still in Nebraska with the Southeast Nebraska Development District—now, as its director of broadband development.
For Borchers-Williams, it’s simple: If he hadn’t done AmeriCorps, he would’ve taken his talent elsewhere—likely, to a city already rich with it. “I would’ve been off doing something else … definitely not in Nebraska,” he told me.
Before the Trump administration slashed AmeriCorps in April, terminating more than 1,000 grants, laying off over 30,000 current workers, and placing 85 percent of its federal staff on administrative leave, members worked across communities both urban and rural in all 50 states. These members represented a vital talent pool, especially in rural and post-industrial regions, overlooked towns, and smaller cities—locales that have experienced generations of skilled youth leaving for more “dynamic states” and major metro areas. In notices to terminated programs, the only reason provided was that their awards “no longer effectuated agency priorities.”
According to the nonprofit America’s Service Commissions (ASC), thousands working rurally were affected. And in non-metropolitan communities, with less deep pockets, shorter philanthropic benches, and fewer places to turn for interim funding—where AmeriCorps is often the only support system—their absence will hit especially hard. “When you look at rural communities, it is not uncommon that if that AmeriCorps member wasn’t there, the service that they are taking on wouldn’t be happening at all,” said Kristen Bennett, chief executive officer with the nonprofit Service Year Alliance.
AmeriCorps members serve with nonprofit and community-based organizations, public agencies, or schools. Those in rural communities worked as tutors, in food pantries, and in disaster response, to name just a few categories of services lost. In North Carolina, for example, 52 AmeriCorps workers were rebuilding homes damaged by Hurricane Helene. When the cuts hit, they were all recalled.
In rural places, however, the losses won’t only be felt in terms of funding or social services, but in terms of people: the members themselves, and the possibility they stay. Time and again, Donald Trump has promised to expand apprenticeship and job training as part of his pledge to the “forgotten men and women” of rural America. But his cuts to AmeriCorps have eliminated thousands of positions that provided just that: on-the-job training and career pathways in industries crucial to rural prosperity. (In addition to gutting AmeriCorps—which, as Paul Glastris has shown, acts as a de facto apprenticeship program for nonprofits—Trump and the GOP are also cutting funding for traditional apprenticeships and other vocational programs, as Bill Scher recently reported.)
Haley Desilet, assistant director of the Rural Health Service Corps in upstate New York, told me that if her AmeriCorps members laid off in April can’t secure (limited) work in their rural placement communities, they’re off to cities. “We’re going to lose them,” she said.
By most measures, rural America is struggling. Rural communities are losing bank branches, hospitals, local news outlets, and grocery stores. Children growing up rurally are more likely to experience economic hardship, witness violence, or live with substance abuse or mental illness in the household. Since the beginning of Trump’s first term, the difference in average household income between metro and nonmetro areas has increased by nearly 30 percent.
But rural communities also have a more insidious challenge, one underlying—and crucial to addressing—all the rest: They’re losing residents. Between 1910 and 2010, the population living rurally in the United States declined from 54 percent to 19 percent, and half of rural counties today have fewer residents than they did in 2000. Rural counties also skew older, with 5 percent more residents 65 and up than cities.
This isn’t a simple story of youth flocking to metropolitan centers because they strive to join the ranks of coastal elites. In many cases, there just aren’t clear pathways for returning to or staying in smaller communities. “Coming out of college, even with an Ivy League degree, I would’ve struggled to find a job in Marquette,” said Evan Bonsall, who returned to his hometown of Marquette, Michigan with Lead For America—the nonprofit that operates the American Connection Corps today—in 2019.
Following decades of deregulation that dismantled the policy levers designed to localize business and check the tendency of a select set of cities to dominate, it’s no wonder that opportunity and upward mobility are sparse in rural America. Service programs are by no means an antidote to geographic inequality, outmigration, or brain drain, but they represent a promising start—one that should be expanded.
“AmeriCorps brings people into towns more used to watching them leave,” Shannon Stober, an AmeriCorps alum, wrote on Instagram in the days following the cuts. “Sometimes, they stay.” When Stober first came to Bozeman, Montana with AmeriCorps in 2002, it was not the billionaire playground shown in Kevin Costner’s Yellowstone. Despite the rest of the country pouring in (Bozeman more than doubled in size between 1990 and 2022), she never left Montana, and has worked in and around service programs in the state for over two decades.
Unlike the moneyed classes that Stober sees as coming to “extract” Montana’s culture or natural resources, she told me service corps members show up to contribute. They lead with questions rather than answers and often live in frontier communities outside the hubs of wealth, where housing is sparse and drives to groceries long. “Montana is a small town with a long road,” Stober said, adding that there’s almost no community along that road that doesn’t have at least one AmeriCorps alum.
Nationwide, 43 percent of AmeriCorps alumni stay in their communities of service, with 27 percent hired on to the organization they served with. In some programs, the numbers are stronger: A survey of American Connection Corps alums this fall found that over 50 percent stayed put, and 36 percent were currently employed by their host organization, according to Taylor Stuckert, Lead for America’s chief executive officer.
When members decide to stay rural, they can fill critical gaps. In her 12 years with the Rural Health Service Corps, Desilet said she has seen alums go on to programs that specialize in rural medicine, with some ultimately becoming the only primary care provider in their area. “Not all of them stay [rural], obviously, but hundreds have,” she said.
Reasons for settling in vary, but several alums I spoke with described the lasting pull of affecting responsibilities. In rural communities, with less funding and limited human capital, service often means shouldering consequential work. For many, seeing the difference they’ve made encourages them to stay put. Arriving back in Marquette, a 22-year-old Bonsall was told, “Evan, you’re a planner,” and went on to rewrite his county’s overdue master plan. Just weeks after his 23rd birthday, he was elected to the city council, becoming the youngest representative in Marquette history.
Meaningful service “amplifies the connection that you feel to places,” said Borchers-Williams. “It gives you a sense of ownership of some of the progress that’s been made. And, at least for me, it really energized me to keep doing that sort of work.”
Members’ successes can also lead to new jobs in communities. Desilet said that host organizations are often able to persuade funders to pay for newly created positions for recent alumni by touting the impact of their service—saying, essentially, “‘Imagine what we could do if they were full-time, if they could stay.’” A 2018 survey of AmeriCorps alumni across five states found that 37 percent of full-time jobs that host sites offered to alums were newly created.
What’s more, those who stay can bring others to their communities. Mark Peiffer, an alum who served in West Virginia, now heads a food security nonprofit there that has hosted six AmeriCorps members since its founding in 2021. (The nonprofit, called Community Markets Inc., was hosting four members when their service was terminated in the administration’s April cuts.)
Meanwhile, as they help to revitalize forgotten corners of America, alums also contribute their own backgrounds and stories. As Tony Pipa, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, pointed out to me, the U.S. today is notably short on institutions that build relationships across geographic difference, especially from metropolitan to rural areas. Pipa, who hosts the podcast Reimagine Rural and sits on the Lead For America’s board, sees “renewing our vows around public service” as a critical step in combating political polarization.
AmeriCorps’s numbers—over 1 million volunteers since 1994—don’t add up to an all-encompassing solution for regions that have experienced generations of outmigration. But service programs are cost-effective investments, which, if expanded, would go a long way toward reversing the trend. By the most conservative estimate, AmeriCorps generates a $17 return on investment for every federal dollar invested. (ASC puts the figure at $34.)
Service opportunities connect people to places, whether familiar to them, or entirely new, building foundations for lasting love of those places to grow. In my case, the place was familiar. In 2019, I returned to my hometown of Arcata, California—tucked away on the state’s far North Coast, known historically for our bustling logging and marijuana industries—as a member of Lead For America’s first cohort of fellows. Stationed in the city manager’s office, I wrote city plans and grants, hosted community events, and was hired at the end of my two-year term. Service was my path back, when I knew home was where I wanted to be but didn’t see a way to get there. These days, the organization that made it happen for me seems to be in the clear funding-wise; They escaped the agency’s April grant terminations. Hundreds of others weren’t so lucky.
There was no “rhyme or reason” to DOGE’s decimation of AmeriCorps, Rachel Bruns, ASC’s chief engagement officer, told me, but state programs—which more often serve rural areas—were harder-hit than national ones. Some lost every state-run program they had.
The slashings prompted 24 states and the District of Columbia to sue and, on June 5, a judge ruled in their favor, ordering the restoration of funds to the plaintiff states (and only to the plaintiffs). Because the suit ran roughly down partisan lines, with far more blue states signing on than red, some that lost their entire state portfolios—including Wyoming, Alabama, and Kansas—also lost their opportunity to change that fate. In Wyoming’s case, its congressional delegation has largely backed DOGE funding cuts.
“President Trump campaigned on draining the swamp—and that’s exactly what DOGE is doing,” Wyoming Senator John Barrasso told Cowboy State Daily. Through AmeriCorps cuts alone, DOGE drained roughly $2.4 million in grants and scholarships from his state, according to ServeWyoming, a nonprofit that administers AmeriCorps grants in the state.
Even where funding has been ordered to be restored, programs will have to be restarted, members reinstated, and grants run through a federal agency that’s operating at only 15 percent staff capacity.
For the Rural Health Service Corps, the funding pause has been “catastrophic,” according to Desilet, who said that some members have already left. Understandably, they couldn’t wait around for months without pay. On June 26, weeks after the decision, plaintiff states received guidance on how to reinstate members.
It’s the same story we’ve seen over and over in Trump’s second term: It’s quicker and easier to break things than to put them back together. In rural communities, where it’s harder to get service programs up and running, much less sustain them, picking up the pieces will be particularly tough.
If Republicans intend to address generations of flight from rural America by creating “massive numbers of jobs” and “rebuilding” communities, as Trump recently promised to do, they should be fighting for and expanding AmeriCorps, not cutting it.
The post How AmeriCorps Kept Young Talent in Rural Communities appeared first on Washington Monthly.
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