Volunteer programs halted across New Mexico with AmeriCorps ‘in shambles’

This week New Mexico in Focus took on the dismantling of an agency that’s made service to others part of the nation’s fabric for over three decades: AmeriCorps. This continues our examination of the cascade of recent federal cuts and how they’re showing up here in New Mexico.
  
You likely associate its members with environmental stewardship and disaster response. Indeed, AmeriCorps teams deployed to northern New Mexico in 2023 to support recovery efforts after the state’s largest-ever wildfire. But AmeriCorps’ nearly $20 million impact in New Mexico last year stretched far beyond our national forests. More than 4,500 members stationed from Taos to Ruidoso, and in cities and pueblos in between, were serving New Mexicans young and old, hungry and unhoused, sick, wounded or otherwise in need, as they were across the country.  

Last month, as a part of the Trump administration’s downsizing blitz, six New Mexico programs and one planning grant got a letter stating their AmeriCorps funding was terminated because it had “been determined that the award no longer effectuates agency priorities,” according to Kristin Hsueh, executive director of the Serve New Mexico Commission. Those contracts amounted to about $2 million. 

There have been staffing cuts, too. 

Reliable numbers across the government have been hard to come by, but the New York Times has fired up a tracker based on what the newspaper’s journalists have been able to confirm. AmeriCorps layoffs rank in the top three of all federal agencies, at 93% of staff.  

We spoke with Democratic U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, the first AmeriCorps alum to serve in the U.S. Senate, on this week’s show. The agency is “in shambles,” Heinrich said. I asked him about the organization’s shoddy financial management history (it’s failed its last eight audits), and whether that justifies cuts in the name of what President Trump calls “fraud, waste and abuse.” He acknowledged the bookkeeping issues and confirmed that “there has been waste, and we can do better.” However, he argued that doesn’t justify this severity of cuts to an organization that does so much good for the community. So, we got into what he, and maybe more so the state Attorney General, can do to push back as a result. 

We didn’t stop this week with the state’s senior senator, however.  

There’s no better way to understand what all of this means for New Mexico than to hear from community members who are living the effects of government action. Rafe Martinez, director of the Albuquerque Sign Language Academy, shared his story of learning a few weeks ago that the charter school’s nearly $400,000 AmeriCorps grant would be stripped away overnight. The ASL academy, which serves not only deaf and hard-of-hearing youth, but also hearing students with developmental disabilities, was using the grant to build out a workforce training program for its students who age out of K-12 school — and the supports that come along with it. Martinez said he was inspired to start the school, and now the job training program, to support his own son, who’s now 22 and ready to enter the workforce.

Martinez said losing its AmeriCorps funding is a significant setback for the project, but that his team is “not going to give up the fight in creating what we think needs to be created around service to adults with disabilities.”  

– Nash Jones, NMiF Host