In 2019, I joined AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps – NCCC – a national service program that deployed young people across the country to build homes, restore ecosystems, respond to disasters, and strengthen communities. Today, that program no longer exists.
One of the last institutions uniting Americans across class, race, and region is gone. Quietly shut down. Not because it failed, but because it worked.
I was born American but raised abroad. My parents were U.S. diplomats. I grew up moving between countries, watching them try to embody the best of this country’s ideals. But I had no real sense of what it meant to live here — among the people they represented.
That changed in 2019 when I deferred college to join NCCC. I didn’t want to sit in a classroom. I wanted to build things, work with my hands, and meet the people who make up this country. I wanted to understand what it meant to be American. And through this program, I did.
They flew me to Colorado, where I met my team: Job Corps graduates, foster youth, Native Americans, kids who had been homeless just months earlier, recent high school grads like me, and college students who’d put their studies on hold. We came from everywhere — small towns, big cities, tribal lands, military families, immigrant households.
My first project was in Greeley, a working-class town on the Colorado plains, shaped by meatpacking plants and immigrant labor. That winter was brutal. The wind cut through our jackets, and when the factories were running, the smell of burned bone drifted across the snow. We lived packed into bunk beds in the basement of the local Habitat for Humanity office, learning how to build homes from the ground up. Even with blistered hands, we framed walls, installed siding, and weatherproofed roofs. And when the work was done, we handed over keys to families — many of them immigrants — who had spent years working toward the chance to own a home. I remember one woman crying as she turned the lock. That moment, standing beside my teammates and watching her step inside, made me feel part of something larger than myself.
One weekend, a local family invited us to their mountain ranch. In exchange for a home-cooked chili dinner, we hiked into the Rockies and helped cut down their Christmas tree. I stood there with chili simmering on the stove, snow falling outside, the Rockies stretching into silence. And I thought: I can’t believe this is our country.
In AmeriCorps, working side by side with strangers to build something real, I came to understand a different kind of citizenship. Not the kind you wave a flag for, but the kind lived out in calloused hands, tight budgets, and early mornings spent helping people you’ve never met. It
was unglamorous, yes, but transformative. It created a new kind of citizen — one who looks outward, who defines patriotism not by symbols but by service. By the work itself.
Later, we were deployed to the Altar Valley, a blistering stretch of southern Arizona desert near one of the most heavily trafficked migrant crossings in the country. Officially, we were there to restore habitat for endangered species like the masked bobwhite quail. But the land told other stories. We found bloodied socks. Prayer beads. Torn fabric. The debris of survival. And death – often less than a mile over the border these people had suffered so long to reach.
Outside our bunkhouse on the National Wildlife Refuge, we lived among a complicated cast: ranchers, conservationists, desert wanderers chasing freedom. We crossed paths with Border Patrol agents, local sheriffs, even armed militiamen. Some were driven by ideology, others by fear or habit. We met them in diners, on back roads, at remote checkpoints. Many were hardened by the terrain. But none spoke about immigration like politicians do. Their words came from proximity — to the desert, the desperation, and the bodies that crossed it.
AmeriCorps gave me a chance to see what most Americans — and certainly most politicians — never do: the human cost of bad policy, the quiet strength of forgotten places, and the hard truth of this beautiful, complicated country.
Our team, like all NCCC teams, became a family. We stretched $4-a-day meal stipends into celebratory dinners. We took turns cooking, led meditations on cracked basketball courts, played music, and watched the stars. Somewhere between hauling wood and washing dishes, I found not just friends but a deeper belief in what America could be.
The program changed my future. I received a $6,000 education award from NCCC. That money meant I didn’t need a second job during college. I could pay rent, buy a laptop, and throw myself into editing my college paper — work that led me to journalism, to advocacy, to where I am today.
Since 1994, more than one million Americans have served in AmeriCorps. Each year, around 75,000 participate: tutoring kids, building homes, responding to disasters, restoring trails and ecosystems. NCCC was its most hands-on branch — full-time, team-based, deeply immersive.
Some call it “soft infrastructure.” But there was nothing soft about it. It was civic scaffolding — the human backbone of our democracy. When floods came, when wildfires tore through towns, when other systems failed, AmeriCorps teams were there. Not with speeches or slogans but with boots on the ground, sleeves rolled up, doing the work.
And it worked. According to Columbia University, every $1 spent on national service returns nearly $4 to society — in reduced public spending, higher earnings, better educational outcomes, and stronger civic engagement. AmeriCorps alums are more likely to vote, volunteer, and pursue service careers.
So why kill a program like that? Because it was everything they hate: public, hopeful, effective, and fair.
The decision to dismantle NCCC was ideological vandalism, part of a broader assault on civic institutions by those who believe government is the enemy. But AmeriCorps wasn’t bloated. It wasn’t partisan. It was a pure expression of what government can do right.
And destroying it wasn’t just wrong — it was unlawful. The executive branch had no authority to eliminate AmeriCorps NCCC, a program created and funded by Congress. It wasn’t theirs to take. That’s not just overreach. It’s theft — from the public, from the communities we served, and from every young American who still dreams of serving something greater than themselves.
The shutdown wasn’t abstract. It left real people stranded. When my friends still serving were abruptly pulled from their posts — no warning, no explanation — they were left not just unemployed but disillusioned. And the communities they were serving? Abandoned. Just ask the families in Alaska whose after-school programs disappeared overnight; the towns in Mississippi where food access and outreach efforts were suddenly halted; or the conservation teams in Tahoe forced to leave trails unfinished and fragile habitats unrestored. That’s just the tip of the iceberg — cuts that will echo for years, weakening the very communities AmeriCorps existed to strengthen.
This isn’t bureaucracy gone wrong. It’s sabotage — a willful betrayal of the country these programs were built to serve.
What kind of leadership fears young people helping one another? What kind of government sees citizenship, empathy, and shared service as threats?
The kind that feeds on division. The kind that cannot survive an engaged, connected public. The kind that sees unity as danger and despair as strategy.
AmeriCorps NCCC wasn’t flashy. It didn’t make headlines. But it changed lives. It shaped mine. And it gave thousands of young Americans the tools to serve something larger than themselves.
They didn’t just end a program. They extinguished a light — one that showed us what America could still become.
Congress must investigate this violation, denounce it, and reverse it. Future leaders must restore what was lost, what has been wasted, and what never should have been destroyed to begin with. You don’t destroy something like AmeriCorps unless you’re trying to destroy the country that made it. Let history remember who did this — and why.
Patrick Hamilton is a former AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps member and a recent graduate of Loyola University New Orleans, where he was editor-in-chief of The Loyola Maroon, a nationally award-winning student newspaper. He writes on civic life, democracy, and public service.
