Repugs want to eliminate AmeriCorps

[marmar]

from the Next American City blog:




Save AmeriCorps
Nathan Rothstein | Feb 17th, 2011



An AmeriCorps volunteer in New Orleans. Credit: ccstbp via Flickr


When I went down to Gulfport, Mississippi in the spring of 2006 to volunteer, I didn’t know the Gulf Coast would be my home for the next four years. I met with people who had lost so much, but still had hope. Inspired by their resilience, as soon as I returned to Umass-Amherst, I desperately wanted to return. For weeks, I would browse the internet, make phone calls, send emails, all in hopes of finding a job that would allow me to participate in the rebuilding process. Finally, I got a call back from the Phoenix of New Orleans and was hired as one of their first AmeriCorps volunteers.

I arrived in a city that had been 80% flooded only nine months earlier. Every home in my new neighborhood had thick, ugly, yellow stains marking the line to which the water had risen.

The roads had not been paved since the 1930s when the WPA hired local workers to improve the city’s public infrastructure. Now there were only a small number of families, maybe a dozen, occupying a neighborhood that in the summer of 2005 had been home to 5,000 people. Our job was to gut the houses, which meant walking into moldy homes, removing furniture, refrigerators, family photos that had been left behind, and tearing out the sheetrock so the rebuilding process could begin.

The work was difficult, the conditions were rough. While American soldiers were abroad fighting two wars, AmeriCorps volunteers rebuilt homes that had been torn apart by our country’s failure to protect our levees. When we had a spare moment, we would walk down to Frenchmen street or go to neighborhood meetings in the evening where we met other young AmeriCorps volunteers working in relief organizations around the city. It became clear that AmeriCorps volunteers led the majority of the volunteer coordination in the city. Anyone who picked up a hammer or painted a wall in the past five years in New Orleans was most likely managed by an AmeriCorps volunteer. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://americancity.org/buzz/entry/2908/