For weeks, one spent hours in the sun handing out free food. Another crawled under houses to get muck out of the insulation. Others repaired homes and worked in warehouses, organizing donations.
The volunteers were some of the 50 members of AmeriCorps, a federal agency program for national service and volunteerism, who worked throughout Western North Carolina on recovery efforts.
Then came the email – the federal grant money that was paying for their programs was eliminated. It “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” the email read.
The cuts came as the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency – known as DOGE – slashed the government workforce and some services.
DOGE cuts eliminated all of the Western North Carolina AmeriCorps programs where members were working with local organizations including Habitat for Humanity, MANNA FoodBank and Conserving Carolina.
The move came as people in Western North Carolina were still recovering from the deadliest and costliest storm to ever hit the state. Conserving Carolina’s Executive Director Kieran Roe called the decision “a major blow, especially when we have so much work to do as we recover from Hurricane Helene.”
Attorneys General from dozens of states call DOGE’s elimination of AmeriCorps programs “unlawful.”
North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson filed a lawsuit against the Corporation for National and Community Service – or AmeriCorps – “for unlawfully terminating congressionally approved grants that fund jobs and critical programs supporting western North Carolina’s recovery from Hurricane Helene.”
"These funds - which Congress already appropriated for North Carolina - are creating jobs, cleaning up storm damage, and helping families rebuild,” Jackson wrote in a press release. “AmeriCorps must follow the law so that people in western North Carolina can confidently move forward.”
AmeriCorps sends about 200,000 corps members across the country as part of its service programs. It also employs more than 500 full-time federal workers and has an operating budget of roughly $1 billion.
Cuts will affect food bank employees
AmeriCorps member Ilsa Kelischek worked with MANNA FoodBank where she organized food drives and coordinated donations from local farmers and grocers. She had just left a planning meeting for the first major food collection drive after Hurricane Helene when she checked her email.
The elimination came a “total shock.” Looking at the termination email from her AmeriCorps supervisor, Kelischek, 27, was left wondering how she would get through the coming weeks.
“Am I still going to have health care? Am I going to be paid for this month?”
Kelischek, an Asheville native, grew up hearing about the work that the food bank did for the community. After leaving the city in high school, she returned home through an AmeriCorps program that has been operating in western North Carolina since 1998.
Project POWER – an acronym for putting opportunity within everyone's reach – is a team of AmeriCorps members “focused on addressing food insecurity and promoting education.”
She called working at MANNA an “incredible experience” that made her feel closer to her community.
“ It's insane the number of people that I knew in the line at the farmer's market after Hurricane Helene,” she said. “I was accepting food donations from people that I had contra danced with. I gave food to the moms of friends that I went to middle school with.”
MANNA offered Kelischek a temporary job until June, at which point she will have to figure out another job before heading to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to pursue a graduate degree in public health. The abrupt end to her program, she said, has left her more determined to help others.
She said she and her AmeriCorps team feel “even more strongly now about the work that we're doing than we did before.”
Disaster response team sent home
Kendra Grillo, 21, led a team of eight other recent college graduates as part of AmeriCorps’ National Civilian Community Corps program. The crew made their way up from Florida after helping communities on the Gulf Coast rebuild after back-to-back hurricanes.
They were scheduled to spend two months helping several nonprofits in Western North Carolina through the United Way.
In Swannanoa, they helped people in the Alan Campos neighborhood rebuild their homes. In Black Mountain, they helped hand out free groceries with Appalachian Community Relief. In their spare time, some of the group volunteered with Asheville Buncombe Community Christian Ministry and 12 Baskets Cafe.
All of this work came to a halt about a month into their work when Grillo heard the news that her program would be terminated. As the team’s leader, she was in charge of organizing flights home for other members and herself.
“It really broke my heart to have to send them home early. All their hard work was just cut short,” she said.
Ariane Kjellquist, a spokeswoman for the Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity, said the organization is losing the equivalent of about 500 hours of labor – representing roughly a third of their construction team.
“ I think we'll feel that most on the home repair side, which has a lot, a lot of people waiting for the services,” she said.
After Helene, the organization partnered with other local housing nonprofits to consolidate the hundreds of requests for home repairs. Kjellquist estimates about 30 have been completed, 60 are under construction and another 130 are being evaluated for repairs.
AmeriCorps members push back on waste claims
The mission of DOGE is to “identify and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse” of federal funds.
Grillo, who was in charge of the budget for her team of eight, said she made every dollar count.
She was given $300 a week for groceries for the team. Each person received just under $200 a week for a living stipend. They slept in churches and clubhouses and wherever else they had space to set up cots.
Grillo said each team member had a per diem of $6.10 for food, “and we would stretch that to be able to feed eight people.”
“If you really understood how transformative it [AmeriCorps] is with such little money, there's no way that someone would call it waste,” she said. “I learned more in my one year of service than I did in four years at my academic institution. And if someone knew what was actually going on and the work that we were doing, I don't believe that they would call it a waste either.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting to this story.
