By Shannon Holmes
March 6, 2006

Under the President’s budget proposal for the fiscal year 2007 the AmeriCorps National Community Civilian Corps (NCCC) program is slated to be reduced from $27 million to $5 million with the goal of closing it down. AmeriCorps NCCC is one of three federal programs devoted to youth service under the umbrella of AmeriCorps established in 1993 as a domestic version of the Peace Corps.

AmeriCorps NCCC, a residential, team-based program, offers approximately 1,300 young people between the ages of 18 to 24 the opportunity to serve their country for ten months on various projects. The primary focus of these are assisting in responding disaster relief and homeland security, as well as concentrating on building homes for low-income families, tutoring and mentoring students at inner-city schools, and undertaking environmental improvement projects. AmeriCorps NCCC members serve each year at the program’s five regional campuses in Charleston (SC), Aurora (CO), Perry Point (MD), Sacramento (CA), and Washington (DC), but since the disaster in the Gulf region the majority of the AmeriCorps NCCC members are in Louisiana and Mississippi rebuilding the area.

After a review of AmeriCorps NCCC, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) stated that the program is “extremely expensive” and that only seven percent of the activities in 2004 were focused on disaster relief, with the majority of the time concentrated on tutoring children, building houses for low-income families, and building trails for national parks.

During the 72nd Annual Meeting of the Conference of Mayors in Boston in June 2004, former Peoria Mayor Richard E. Carver, Chair of the Advisory Board for AmeriCorps NCCC, told mayors, “These young people leave with the experience of working to make a community better. The next generation are wonderful people that will be a bright spot in our communities, they are our future.”

The larger two programs under AmeriCorps – AmeriCorps State and National grants and AmeriCorps Vista – face slight budget cuts in the FY 2007 budget proposal. Yet since FY 2004, there has been a decrease of about 17 percent of funding to the state and national, which directly go to fund the local AmeriCorps programs. In 2007 it is estimated that there will be 75,000 participants in the AmeriCorps program.

Since 1994, 10,000 AmeriCorps NCCC members have been among the more than 300,000 people who have served with AmeriCorps, which engages Americans in intensive service to meet community needs in education, the environment, public safety, homeland security, and other areas. In return for a year of service, each AmeriCorps member receives a $4,725 education award that can be used to pay back student loans or to cover future tuition for post'secondary education. Since the inception of AmeriCorps, the Conference of Mayors has been in full support of the program and has strong policy supporting not only the program, but everything the program stands for – building stronger communities.