5 Reasons Why Congress Should Renew Public Health AmeriCorps Funding

In 2021, the Biden–Harris administration created Public Health AmeriCorps, using American Rescue Plan Act funds, to address our communities’ public health needs while providing a pathway into public health careers. That legislation provided $400 million through Fiscal Year 2024, and those funds have not gone to waste: in the Spring of 2023, the program allocated more than 100 grants, totaling $90 million, to state and local agencies.

That visionary step to create a Public Health AmeriCorps was in keeping with an American tradition dating back to President John F. Kennedy’s creation of the Peace Corps, and his view that a similar service program should inspire and empower young people at home as well.

AmeriCorps was created in 1993 during the Clinton administration and launched with an inaugural class of 20,000 members. It has enjoyed strong nonpartisan support, including an expansion under President George W. Bush, who, after the 9/11 attacks, used his 2002 State of the Union address to challenge every American to spend two years of their lives, or 4,000 hours, serving their community or the nation as a whole.

AmeriCorps now engages some 200,000 members and volunteers annually in service. Throughout its growth over the past thirty years, it has introduced new partnerships with other agencies. For instance, in 2012, AmeriCorps partnered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to launch FEMA Corps and give young people foundational experience for disaster response careers. Over the past ten years, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has hired 23 percent of FEMA Corps alumni, while City Year reports that 47 percent of its alumni continue to work in and around schools following their terms of service.

Each of the programs has a place in addressing twenty-first-century threats, including the catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic. AmeriCorps’ innovative partnership capacity was on full display with the launch of its Public Health AmeriCorps collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Public Health AmeriCorps aims to address the public health needs of local communities in state and local health settings with a focus on advancing equitable health outcomes for underserved communities. It strives to create pathways into high-quality public health careers through onsite experience and training, with a focus on recruiting AmeriCorps members who reflect the communities in which they serve. Public Health AmeriCorps members provide public health education, support health-related research, and assist with testing and vaccination efforts.

Since 2021, the program has successfully deployed more than 3,500 service members at more than 100 state and local organizations, but some of the funds have been lost due to Congress clawing back unspent COVID relief funds. At the same time, legislatures in many states passed bills explicitly to limit the power and funding of COVID-19 response from local and state public health departments, as well as for future public health threats. These roadblocks and divestments don’t just risk the health of the community: it also undercuts the resilience of the public health workforce for years to come, cutting future health workers off from a critical source of career opportunities.

These roadblocks and divestments don’t just risk the health of the community: it also undercuts the resilience of the public health workforce for years to come, cutting future health workers off from a critical source of career opportunities.

We argue that Congress should renew Public Health AmeriCorps funding when it expires in FY 2025 to ensure that grant-making continues without interruptions. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed systemic weaknesses in U.S. public health systems, as well as astonishing levels of burnout among health workers. Public Health AmeriCorps is a uniquely valuable service program that can provide a workforce pathway for thousands of Americans to serve their communities and enter into public health careers, service and careers which the nation direly needs.

Ensuring that the program survives and thrives is vital to building the nation’s resilience against future public health threats, not just in the case of infectious pandemics, but also in those of chronic disease, substance abuse, mental health, or other local needs. The program has key virtues, including 1) fostering innovative interagency partnerships, 2) providing stable funding sources, 3) building community trust, 4) maintaining state and local partnerships with more robust data tracking, and 5) waiving requirements for matching funds.

In what follows, we provide evidence and context for these virtues. The research has been based on eight interviews with relevant experts and stakeholders, from state and federal AmeriCorps officials to local grant administrators and AmeriCorps members.

Reason 1: Public Health AmeriCorps members disseminate public health information and medical support in underserved areas, including non-English speaking communities. And in doing so, they build the next generation of the public health workforce.

In the national media, the COVID-19 pandemic became politicized, which contributed to a chronically misinformed public in many parts of the country. AmeriCorps can fill this information gap in ways that are both precision-targeted and authentically homegrown.

Boat People SOS (BPSOS)—a national, refugee-run organization with programs supporting Vietnamese boat people in California, Virginia, Georgia, Texas, and the Gulf Coast—is a Public Health AmeriCorps grantee.

During the pandemic, BPSOS brought on AmeriCorps members, Long Hoang and Andrew Ngo, to implement its public health and mental health programs in Orange County, California, an area that boasts the largest number of Vietnamese residents outside of the country Vietnam.

Hoang and Ngo worked as community health workers focused on COVID-19 vaccine uptake among Vietnamese older adults, which included educating them about the vaccine’s efficacy and approval process and transporting people to clinics.

In California, half of the Vietnamese residents that BPSOS serves are limited in their English proficiency. Furthermore, many are not smartphone literate, and many don’t drive. So BPSOS scheduled vaccination drives connected to other community weekend gatherings, which also doubled as opportunities for residents to see Vietnamese doctors, find local pharmacies, and register for Medicare or Medicaid.

As Vietnamese Americans themselves, Hoang and Ngo were able to relate to and engage with community members at an intimate linguistic and cultural level. They could nimbly navigate differences in Vietnamese dialects that others wouldn’t have known—for instance, subtle differences in the words for “mental health” that, if not communicated correctly, might carry a more stigmatizing connotation of “being crazy.”

Hoang and Ngo received close mentoring from their supervisor—a Vietnamese immigrant with a master’s degree in public health—who nominated them for an award and helped arrange a speaking slot for them to share their experiences at the annual American Public Health Association conference.

Hoang aspires to be a public health nurse, and Ngo wants to become a primary care physician. Their service years bolstered their goals, paying them for critical frontline work during the pandemic, tying them closer to their communities, and setting up their next career steps.

“You’re going to see me back in Orange County,” Hoang said.

While individual AmeriCorps experiences can vary, Hoang and Ngo give a clear positive example of the program performing well in its public service and career development goals.

Reason 2: Public Health AmeriCorps members are recruited from the community, and actively utilize existing trust and relationships.

One of the most well-documented problems from the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic was the pernicious role of misinformation and the vaccination hesitancy that resulted. Unfortunately, communities exposed to higher amounts of misinformation had lower vaccination rates, and therefore suffered more COVID-19 hospitalizations.

AmeriCorps, by contrast, illustrates a clear model for how to rebuild a sense of trust with public health. The key to its success in this regard is its ethos of designing solutions of, by, and for the community.

AmeriCorps illustrates a clear model for how to rebuild a sense of trust with public health.

The approach is sustainable, according to Jennifer Schroeder Tyson, a faculty member at Appalachian State University in the Department of Public Health and Exercise Science in Boone, North Carolina. As a subgrantee of the state-wide Volunteer North Carolina, Tyson managed two primary programs. The first dealt with mental health and suicide prevention.The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the need for better mental health interventions in the rural Appalachian community. The program implemented Psychological First Aid, an evidence-based program designed to respond to the mental health needs of individuals in the immediate aftermath of disaster or traumatic event.

In addition to the psychological first aid program, Appalachian State’s AmeriCorps members stood up a Medical Reserve Corps (MRC), a unit of community-based volunteers who give their time to respond to emergencies and support preparedness initiatives. The MRC was well aligned within Appalachian State’s Beaver College of Health Sciences, where students were keenly interested in being part of the COVID-19 response. The university could take on the administrative approach—the reporting, financial elements, reporting, and personnel hiring—which local entities don’t always have the capacity to do.

“On one hand, I had students that said, ‘I want to help’. And then on the other hand, I had the local health department saying, ‘We need help’… But there was no easy connection between the two parties.” Tyson told us. She had a tough job as an intermediary, with public health workers feeling vastly overwhelmed by the steep responsibilities of pandemic response. At the same time, students needed support, training, and a bit of hand-holding, but once they were plugged in, they could be “high performers.”

The program created satellite locations in local communities. For instance, a local preparedness coordinator in Polk County—who was enthusiastic about the program—became the county lead, being the person with the deepest and longest-standing local relationships in her area. Even traveling from one county to the next might feel like entering “a different universe,” Tyson said, which makes sensitivity paramount.. “We have a saying in Appalachia: ‘when you have seen one county, you have seen one county.’”

All in all, the Public Health AmeriCorps program empowered local people who deeply understood and cared about their own communities to design responses that best fit their needs.

“The idea we had was to train members in Psychological First Aid, while also continuing to develop this local community capacity with members who transition and maybe even become professionals within those communities,” she said.

They ensured that the corps members set up aLinkedIn profile, interviewed them after their year to collect stories about their service, and plan to have continuous data collection on Public Health AmeriCorps members after they complete their service position.

Reason 3: Public Health AmeriCorps is an innovative interagency partnership between AmeriCorps and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Public Health AmeriCorps program is an innovative interagency partnership between AmeriCorps and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The partnership supports the recruitment, training, and development of members interested in public health careers and equips them to respond to the nation’s public health needs. It is unique from other AmeriCorps programs due to the fact that staff at Public Health AmeriCorps and the CDC work closely to manage the daily aspects of the program and provide specialized training for members.

Cleo Hirsh, the deputy director of Public Health AmeriCorps, describes the interagency partnership as an “opportunity to harness the AmeriCorps federal agency’s expertise in managing public service projects rooted in community and the CDC’s technical expertise as the nation’s leading public health agency.”

The partnership also allows for a unique approach to evaluation. The CDC is leading and funding a multi-year independent study of the program. The study aims to assess the effect of the program on members’ post-service outcomes, whether it affected participants’ plans to continue in the public health field, and member satisfaction. The hope is that the research will also provide insights on how to build more programs at the intersection of national service and workforce development, as well as provide data on how to tweak and improve the program.

Reason 4: Public Health AmeriCorps partners with national and local health organizations to provide additional support and resources for AmeriCorps members.

In addition to the federal interagency partnership at the core of Public Health AmeriCorps, the program works closely with local, state, and national organizations to make connections between the national service and public health fields.

These partners provide support connecting grantees with state, tribal, and local governments, as well as public health agencies and officials. They also provide training and resources for members, including workforce development training, educational opportunities, and support in finding post-service opportunities in the public health sector.

These partners include the National Association of County and City Health Organizations (NACCHO); the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO); the American Public Health Association (APHA); the National Network of Public Health Institutes (NNPHI), which provides direct support to the program; the CDC Foundation; and the RAND Corporation, the latter two of which provide support with public health communication.

These partnerships launched an online job board and funded scholarships for Public Health AmeriCorps members, covering the cost of travel and attendance, and allowing them to participate in their annual conference for the National Association of County and City Health Officials. These members had the opportunity to spend several days networking, attending sessions with public health leaders from across the country, and learning how to get a job in the field after they finished their service year.

“It was inspiring to see members come together from such different circumstances,” said Cleo Hirsch. “Some [of these members] flew on their first plane ride to get there, some of which had their first ever public speaking experience…and we were able to provide the scaffolding and support so that members felt really comfortable accessing that experience.”

Reason 5: Public Health AmeriCorps is flexible, allowing for state-level interagency partnerships and innovative multi-state program models.

There is wide variation across the Public Health AmeriCorps portfolio in terms of how grantees work with state and local health officials. Some grants go directly to national organizations that operate across multiple states. Other Public Health AmeriCorps grants go through the AmeriCorps State and National grant distribution process and are channeled through state service commissions, which is how states determine the nonprofits that receive the AmeriCorps funding.

This decentralization meant that during the pandemic, program funds were managed differently state by state. Some states embraced interagency partnerships across state government, such as in Colorado, while others simply passed the money through to a few nonprofits on the ground.

Serve Colorado, the AmeriCorps state entity charged with administering AmeriCorps funding, partnered with the Trailhead Institute, a public health nonprofit, to build the first-of-its-kind Public Health AmeriCorps Apprenticeship Program. They worked with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment to establish the Community Health Worker Registered Apprenticeship Program, known as the Colorado Public Health Works (CPHW) program. The program is based at a public health institute and designs and administers funds and provides technical assistance to local public health agencies. Members of the program serve at public health agencies across the state.

John Kelly, executive director of the AmeriCorps State Service Commission in Colorado, remarked about the new program, “A lot of people have this preconception of AmeriCorps as being something nice to do, or a gap year. And when there’s this national partnership between CDC and the Federal AmeriCorps agency. It can really catch people’s attention [that] this is part of the solution to beefing up our public health system and our local public health agencies.”

Public Health AmeriCorps is proving itself at an inflection point in history.

In his 1961 inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy famously encouraged Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” That sentiment became the DNA of the Peace Corps and later AmeriCorps programs, integral to how our democracy harnesses the energy of youthful enthusiasm toward the public good.

Today, we have another historic opportunity with the so-called “Fauci effect.” The example of health care leaders during the pandemic has motivated young people to see the value in health careers as never before. They want to dedicate their lives to the field. U.S. medical schools saw an 18-percent uptick in applications in 2020, for instance.

That new wave of interest is crucial for sustaining our public health systems. According to a 2021 analysis by the de Beaumont Foundation and the Public Health National Center for Innovations, “state and local health departments need to hire a minimum of 80,000 more full-time equivalent positions (FTEs)—an increase of nearly 80 percent—to provide adequate infrastructure and a minimum package of public health services.” A similar recent study by the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health found that nearly half of all public health employees in state and local agencies left their jobs between 2017 and 2021. More disturbingly, that number was 75 percent for workers under 35 or who had served shorter tenures in their roles.

Public Health AmeriCorps is a vital response to this need, helping connect this new generation that wants to serve in public health to public health opportunities across the country. It’s the right model at the right time. However, because the program is funded as part of the 2021 American Rescue Plan, it will cease to operate if Congress does not provide new funding. Luckily, President Joe Biden champions public service.

In his 2022 United We Stand Summit on combating hate-fueled violence, President Biden called for “a new era of national service through organizations like AmeriCorps to foster stronger communities and bridge divides in our society.” President Biden can channel this enthusiasm for public service into his Fiscal Year 2025 Presidential Budget Request and call on Congress to restore funding for Public Health AmeriCorps from funding cuts, including renewing funding for Public Health AmeriCorps beyond its initial five-year period. He should also stay true to his call at that summit to raise the living allowance for national service positions to $15 an hour, to “make national service an accessible pathway to success for more Americans of all backgrounds.”

This is a moment to defend our public health workforce, ensure communities have the resources they need to combat future pandemics, and give thousands of Americans the opportunity to access public health careers.

Public Health AmeriCorps members answered the call to serve during our nation’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. There will be future pandemics that will require Public Health AmeriCorps members to be on the frontline of the crisis. This is a moment to defend our public health workforce, ensure communities have the resources they need to combat future pandemics, and give thousands of Americans the opportunity to access public health careers.

Americans have always rallied to the greatest challenges presented to them, and as a society, we should reward this service. Just as we passed the GI Bill after World War II—and gave millions of U.S. service members access to education and job opportunities—Congress should stand behind this group of idealistic future leaders and fund Public Health AmeriCorps for years to come.