AmeriCorps Opens Federal Grants Competition

AmeriCorps, the federal agency for service and volunteerism, has announced that the 2025 State and National Grants Competition is now open for applications from organizations who wish to host AmeriCorps members beginning in the summer of 2025.

In announcing the competitive grants, AmeriCorps stated that

For this funding opportunity, AmeriCorps will prioritize consideration from organizations that:

Serve Communities

• Serve communities with concentrated poverty, rural communities, tribal communities, and historically underrepresented and underserved individuals. These may include people of color, immigrants, refugees, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people with arrest or conviction records, religious minorities, etc.;
• Implement programs for or expand access to high-quality youth mental health and substance use recovery services and prepare AmeriCorps members to enter behavioral health careers. These may include individuals with lived experience with substance use and mental health challenges to support youth mental health efforts and continued AmeriCorps work on the opioid epidemic;
• Focus on improving the quality of life for veterans, active-duty members of the Armed Forces, and their families by recruiting veterans, military spouses, and their older children into national service; 
• Promote environmental stewardship to help communities (especially underserved households and communities) to be more resilient by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, conserving land and water, increasing renewable energy use and improving at-risk ecosystems; and
• Support civic bridgebuilding programs and projects to reduce polarization and community divisions; and providing training in civic bridgebuilding skills and techniques to AmeriCorps members.

Benefit AmeriCorps Members

• Provide benefits to AmeriCorps members aimed at enhancing member experience and bolstering member recruitment and retention such as paying more than the minimum living allowance, transportation, housing, food, etc.;
• Create workforce pathways for AmeriCorps members, including deliberate training, certifications, and hiring preferences or support;
• Enhance and expand services to second chance youth and/or engage those youth as AmeriCorps members; and
• Develop and train the next generation of diverse public health leaders through service while addressing pressing community health challenges. Review Public Health AmeriCorps Priority in the Mandatory Supplemental Information for eligibility information.

Use Evidence

• Utilize reports from the AmeriCorps Evidence Exchange on programs assessed as having Moderate or Strong evidence to scale, replicate, or adapt the intervention.

Faith-Based

• Organizations that are faith-based.

American Climate Corps 

Applicants may propose projects to be affiliated with the American Climate Corps (ACC), which is a federal government national service and workforce development initiative focused on training young people for the clean energy and climate resilience workforce.

Applicants who are interested must demonstrate that their project funds ACC eligible positions meeting the following criteria:

• The position has verifiable climate or environmental impact.
• The position is temporary (term-limited), and the term length is at least 300 hours.
• The position includes skills-based training as part of the program and provides a pathway to employment.
• The position must receive a living allowance and, in some cases, may receive additional member benefits.

To receive priority consideration, applicants must show the priority area is a significant part of the program focus and intended outcomes. Priority consideration does not guarantee funding.

The application deadline is 5 p.m., Thursday, January 23, 2025. Successful applicants will likely be notified by mid-April 2025. Funding will be released in July.

Prof. Vaughn E. James, Texas Tech University School of Law