AmeriCorps

Federal department subsidizing Community Service?

AmeriCorps is a division of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which also oversees the Senior Corps and Learn and Serve America. Collectively, these three programs represent a total of more than two million members in service each year. AmeriCorps itself is split into three main divisions, including AmeriCorps State and National, VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), and NCCC (National Civilian Community Corps). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmeriCorps

AmeriCorps, which was heralded as a domestic version of the Peace Corps, is the largest national and community "service" program since the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s. Its parent organization, the Corporation for National Service (CNS), was created in 1993 to administer several federal service grant programs, including AmeriCorps. The program has three statutory goals: to advance youth volunteerism; to use volunteers to address pressing community problems; and to leverage private sector financial support using CNS grants as seed money. These goals are supposedly achieved by giving volunteers an "educational award" to help pay for college or pay off Student Loan-s. Thus, AmeriCorps helps those students who would normally not be able to afford college tuition... The most obvious and striking anomaly about AmeriCorps is that, despite all the grand rhetoric, it is not a volunteer program at all. Rather, it recruits college-age students for paid positions and then uses taxpayers dollars to subsidize the organizations and agencies that hire these recruits. <http://councilfor.cagw.org/site/Page Server?pagename=reports_americorps>