{"id":47058,"date":"2025-05-16T15:11:57","date_gmt":"2025-05-16T22:11:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newmexicopbs.org\/productions\/newmexicoinfocus\/?p=47058"},"modified":"2025-05-16T15:12:30","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T22:12:30","slug":"volunteer-programs-halted-across-new-mexico-with-americorps-in-shambles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newmexicopbs.org\/productions\/newmexicoinfocus\/volunteer-programs-halted-across-new-mexico-with-americorps-in-shambles\/","title":{"rendered":"Volunteer programs halted across New Mexico with AmeriCorps ‘in shambles\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This week New Mexico in Focus took on the dismantling of an agency that\u2019s 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\u2019re showing up here in New Mexico.
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You likely associate its members with environmental stewardship and disaster response. Indeed, AmeriCorps teams deployed to northern New Mexico<\/a> in 2023 to support recovery efforts after the state\u2019s largest-ever wildfire. But AmeriCorps\u2019 nearly $20 million impact<\/a> 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.\u00a0\u00a0

Last month, as a part of the Trump administration\u2019s downsizing blitz, six New Mexico programs and one planning grant got a letter stating their AmeriCorps funding was terminated because it had \u201cbeen determined that the award no longer effectuates agency priorities,\u201d according to Kristin Hsueh, executive director of the Serve New Mexico Commission. Those contracts amounted to about $2 million.\u00a0

There have been staffing cuts, too.\u00a0

Reliable numbers across the government have been hard to come by, but the New York Times has fired up a tracker<\/a> based on what the newspaper\u2019s journalists have been able to confirm. AmeriCorps layoffs rank in the top three of all federal agencies, at 93% of staff.\u00a0\u00a0

We spoke with Democratic U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, the first AmeriCorps alum to serve in the U.S. Senate, on this week\u2019s show. The agency is \u201cin shambles,\u201d Heinrich said. I asked him about the organization\u2019s shoddy financial management history (it\u2019s failed its last eight audits<\/a>), and whether that justifies cuts in the name of what President Trump calls \u201cfraud, waste and abuse.\u201d He acknowledged the bookkeeping issues and confirmed that \u201cthere has been waste, and we can do better.\u201d However, he argued that doesn\u2019t 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<\/a>, can do to push back as a result.\u00a0

We didn\u2019t stop this week with the state\u2019s senior senator, however.\u00a0\u00a0

There\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 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\u2019s now 22 and ready to enter the workforce.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Martinez said losing its AmeriCorps funding is a significant setback for the project, but that his team is \u201cnot going to give up the fight in creating what we think needs to be created around service to adults with disabilities.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0

– Nash Jones, NMiF Host<\/p>\n\n\n\n