So far, many of the local organizations that have seen federal funding cuts during the Trump administration’s first 100 days have seemed resigned to their fate.
But not Goshen Mayor Gina Leichty.
Across the country Friday, people who serve under the AmeriCorps program received an email saying they’d been eliminated from the program. That, despite the federal government last year having promised them a living stipend and college tuition money in exchange for a year of service with a participating nonprofit or local government.
Goshen’s five AmeriCorps members had planned the next morning to help out as the city gave away about 600 trees for Earth Day. They showed up regardless, willing to volunteer.
Their dedication impressed the mayor.
"I was just dumfounded," Leichty said. "Just the caliber of professionalism and commitment, and the care they had, not only for our community but the colleagues that they had been working with, to not leave them hanging even though the federal government had abandoned them."
Goshen’s forester, Aaron Sawatsky-Kingsley, says he was not surprised the five young adults, all of them Goshen natives, showed up Saturday morning.
"That's the kind of dedication, the kind of passion that I've seen from them," Sawatsky-Kingsley said.
So Leichty has decided to pay their stipends for the remaining four months, hiring them as temporary city employees, from money the city has in a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Forestry.
"As a city, we simply have to do something to make sure that all of this work that these young professionals have committed to, and that the city has committed to, isn't just tossed in the garbage," Leichty said. "That would be completely irresponsible for us to take eight months worth of work and just throw it away before it's actually brought to completion."
Leichty says she’ll also look for philanthropic resources or private donations to pay the AmeriCorps members’ the college money that Trump’s cuts have taken away.
There are 10 other Americorps colleagues serving other parts of Northern Indiana. They include Beacon Resource Center, Church Community Services’ Seed to Feed program, the city of Mishawaka, the Community Foundation of Elkhart County, Green Bridge Growers, the Michiana Area Council of Governments or MACOG, the Shirley Heinz Land Trust, and the Tolson Center in Elkhart.
MACOG has administered the program locally. Its executive director, James Turnwald, says he was disheartened by the cuts because AmeriCorps has been “extremely impactful.” He says they’ve done things like enhancing local parks and improving access to high-quality childcare and community gardens.
22-year-old Goshen native Lucy Kramer is one of the Goshen AmeriCorps colleagues. She’s taking a year off from her anthropology major at Colorado College, a small liberal arts school in Colorado Springs.
Kramer says she shouldn’t have been surprised by the cuts, in light of all that Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have done. But she says it still felt abrupt.
Kramer's project has been to work on a maintenance plan the city can follow for its parks.
"Identifying areas that can have different maintenance plans for different reasons," she said. "Trying to do stuff that's best for the maintenance team that kind of saves them time, effort, hassle, that also aligns with best ecological practices, and improving habitat and riparian areas."
Kramer says she’s sad about the impact the cuts will have on the city’s Environmental Resilience Department.
"They do so much good work here and I've always looked up to their work, being from Goshen. They're putting on a lot of good projects so it's really just sad to see this kind of taken from them in that way."
Sawatsky-Kingsley, the city forester, says the city has been utilizing AmeriCorps colleagues since 2022, a year after the city’s common council unanimously adopted a climate action plan for the city.
"We have come to really value and depend on them," he said. "If they're eliminated, it changes, in a dramatic way, our ability to continue to pick away at parts of that plan, which leaves us with 20th Century solutions for 21st Century problems and reality."
On Tuesday a group of 24 states, including Michigan, sued the Trump Administration in federal court, attempting to block the AmeriCorps cuts.
