Back in the spring of 2017, the Trump administration’s first budget proposed the elimination of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which funds, among other things, AmeriCorps, our domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps. The administration’s reasoning went, “Funding community service and subsidizing the operation of nonprofit organizations is outside the role of the Federal Government. To the extent these activities have value, they should be supported by the nonprofit and private sectors.”
But they did not succeed in their efforts and, four years on, AmeriCorps is going strong, with 75,000 people in the field at any one time, engaging in valuable activities at 21,000 locations and contributing millions of man and woman hours to a vast range of education, environmental, health, and public safety projects.
AmeriCorps was created by President Bill Clinton in 1993, and absorbed a prior iteration, Volunteers In Service To America (VISTA), which had been created as part of LBJ’s war on poverty in 1965. AmeriCorps VISTA retains its aim to alleviate poverty, and is one of three branches of the current program. The other two are AmeriCorps State and National, which provides grants and manpower to nonprofit organizations, and AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps, a full-time, one-year residency-based volunteer program for men and women ages 18-24.
On March 16 of last year, Claudia Maurino of Lenox, then a freshman at the University of Massachusetts, turned 19. That was also the day Governor Baker locked down the state, which means every day of her 19th year has been in quarantine. As a theater major who’d already played in a college production of Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” and for whom the work is “all about being together in a room,” virtual drama classes just didn’t cut it. In May, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged apace, and theaters and concert venues in Berkshire County were cancelling their summer seasons, Claudia guessed, correctly, that her sophomore year would begin, and likely remain, remote. No thanks, she thought.
“I love school,” she said. “I love being a student. I couldn’t see having anything but a good version of it.” She started looking into alternative plans for the upcoming school year, and landed on AmeriCorps NCCC, for what would be a 10-month work commitment, the nature of which she would not learn until she’d already committed.
Volunteer service had been only vaguely on her radar and, by the time she got serious about research, the deadline for the NCCC program was just two weeks away. She had to apply immediately. Unclear about what Plan B might look like, she fretted, “Man, I really hope this works out!” Apart from a friend who is now working with an education-based AmeriCorps program in Boston, no one else she knows of is enrolled in a full-time program to avoid a virtual school year.
AmeriCorps NCCC has four campuses: in Iowa, California, Colorado, and Mississippi. The program tries to place volunteers furthest from home, to maximize participants’ cross-cultural education, so Claudia is now based out of Sacramento, on the campus of a former Air Force base, McClellan Park. She describes her living quarters as, “like an old grungy college dorm, with green and brown carpet and stains on the floor.” Her roommate is from Minnesota, and her eight other teammates are from all over the country, with a healthy Midwestern representation.
There are 220 volunteers stationed together at McClellan Park, but, with COVID restrictions, the larger group has limited opportunities to connect. During their three weeks of initial training, which included two COVID tests, she explained, “We sat as far apart as possible in a conference room, and they presented some engaging and not so engaging things … we learned about the history of AmeriCorps, the project sequence. We met in our group of 10 and made up a mini-Constitution for ourselves.”
Getting to know one another while wearing masks and being six feet apart wasn’t ideal, and Claudia spent a fair bit of time alone. “I didn’t make a big effort to meet people at a distance. I read five books and did crossword puzzles. There was a ton of downtime.”
Then, all of a sudden, things got busy, fast. The team was assigned to disaster relief demolition and reconstruction work in Lake Charles, La., a small industrial city that has, Claudia said, “A very different vibe than New Orleans.” It is tied with Port Arthur, Texas and Astoria, Ore. for the highest daily average humidity level in the U.S. Because of the intensity of last year’s hurricane season, and the high volume of people needed to help rebuild, Lake Charles requested AmeriCorps teams from across the country.
Claudia’s team road-tripped for 32 hours in a 15-passenger van, which was, “actually only an 11-seater, piled full. We couldn’t see in the rearview mirror.” The trip took four days, with stops in Needles, Calif., Albuquerque, N.M., and Wichita Falls, Texas.
Claudia loved the wide-open landscape, which was entirely new to her. “I had done a lot of foreign travel to London, Ireland, and Ecuador, but had barely left Massachusetts otherwise. When the country is never-ending in front of you, how small you can feel in such a big place. The Berkshires can put blinders on you. You can’t see much in front of you.”
The team stopped at the Grand Canyon, which was majestic, but Claudia’s favorite sights were not rock formations, but her fellow Americans and their environs. “I like to play sociologist, like at a gas station. Gas stations say a lot about the community and what they need.” She loved the chance to observe such a huge variety of humankind. “It was kind of awesome.”
Once they’d arrived in Lake Charles, however, awesome would not be the word Claudia would use to describe her living situation. “We were in a warehouse of a medical clinic at the side of a highway. We slept in one room with two bathrooms, and ten cots arranged in rows. We’d make soup at night by the light of our flashlight on a two-burner stove in another building.” Each volunteer received a living stipend of $80 per week and a food allowance of $4 per day, which can actually make some pretty good meals, Claudia says, when pooled together. Upon completion of service, they will receive an education award of $6,200, though most of her fellow volunteers are older and have graduated from college.
As in the American military, team members are not allowed to talk about politics on the work site. There’s clearly a range of opinion, though, which, Claudia said, “is very unlike in college where you have a choice in the people you surround yourself with. Most of the people in college, we’re all on the same side.”
Her group was not exempt from political meddling, however. One day, during orientation, the group was scheduled to receive a diversity training, but then were told that the federal government had forbidden it.
Their employer in Lake Charles was the faith-based organization Fuller Center Disaster Rebuilders, an offshoot of Habitat for Humanity. Workdays were unpredictable, with plans often changing at the last minute. “We’d find out at 9:30 p.m. where we’d be the next day, and what we’d be doing.” They worked in various houses, hauling away debris and fallen trees. For the interior demolition work, which involved mold removal, they got suited up in outfits that reminded Claudia of the guys who come to steal E.T. in the 1982 movie, and wore N95 masks eight hours a day.
They crowbarred drywall and insulation, which had also molded. They learned about the two kinds of insulation, neither of which, she said, was fun to handle. “The first kind stings like little needles and the other falls to pieces, and the pieces go everywhere. You can fill one thousand trash bags. It was hot, hard work, but you peel off your suit at the end of the day and feel fulfilled. I do look back on it fondly. It was good fun.”
But, I wondered, did she ever question her decision to give up creating theater from the comfort of her bedroom for swamp-like weather, N95 masks, and moldy insulation?
“There was definitely a lot of, ‘I don’t want to be doing this.’ One day I spent four hours pulling staples and nails out of a ceiling, with my hands up in the air. That was so not fun. Another day, I thought it was the end of the day and the supervisor kept finding things for us to do, like take out half a bathroom. Installation fell in my eye and I was like, ‘That’s it!!’ I tore out of the house. But I went back inside and we were done in an hour.”
Claudia’s mother, Dana Harrison, an educator at Shakespeare & Company, sees her daughter’s service experience thus far as “hugely beneficial.” She’s especially impressed by how she tackled the Lake Charles jobs. “She just dove right in! The first assignment struck me and her brother as horrible, but she just loved it. She’s grown this practical skill set, tearing down and building homes and working in a team. She’s a poet, writer, actor, and politically minded, too, but being active on the ground, helping people who are suffering, I think that’s really what lights her up.”
Her dad, writer Marc Maurino, is especially excited by the range of geography, human experience, political opinion, and culture to which Claudia is being exposed. “She’s not sheltered, but she was raised middle class, and white, in the Berkshires. She saw homes ravaged by tornadoes, and lived in and participated in cultures she hadn’t had any experience with, in rural Louisiana.”
He was also struck by the more practical knowledge Claudia is gleaning. “On Christmas morning, we hauled out a big black bag for the gift wrapping, and she said, ‘That’s not a contractor bag, that won’t hold shingles.’ I am proud my daughter learned what hard, physical work looks and feels like.”
During the last two and a half weeks of their eight-week Lake Charles assignment, the team got to see a project through from demolition to construction, which Claudia especially liked. “We built tresses and put new roofing on. Seeing a house fall apart and then come back together, that was great.”
When she returns to her dorm in Sacramento, back from a 10-day holiday break, Claudia will have a desk job until mid-March, which will call for very different skills. Her team will soon go to work helping to stop the spread of COVID-19, working in rooms by themselves, making phone calls as contact tracers for the state of Colorado.
And after that? “Then, we don’t know, but we are working very hard to manifest Alaska or Hawaii.”
Even without the benefits of time or distance, Claudia can see how her AmeriCorps life will serve her in the long run. She’s learning how to “get crafty and resourceful” with ingredients, buying in bulk at Walmart, and working “within a food budget and compiling lists judiciously.” Adaptability is another, daily lesson. “You don’t learn it once and then you’re done. You need to go with the flow as things change all the time.”
She’s also learning patience. “I really like things that go fast and quick and challenge me cerebrally, and a lot of the work was physical. Hauling trees, hauling garbage, my body would be doing things, but my brain would be thinking, ‘What else can I be doing now?’ I learned my academic brain doesn’t always need to be working in overtime. I can just be experiencing the moment and not do anything else.”
