(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
DOGE Cuts Debilitate Rural Oregon’s AmeriCorps Program [1]
['Claire Carlson', 'The Daily Yonder', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width', 'Vertical-Align Bottom .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow .Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2025-07-22
Titus Tomlinson can’t travel through rural Oregon without someone recognizing him.
“You’re that RARE guy!” people say, referencing the acronym for Resource Assistance for Rural Environments, a program by the University of Oregon that places AmeriCorps members with organizations throughout the state. Its mission is to increase the capacity of rural communities to improve their “economic, social, and environmental conditions.”
Tomlinson has worked for the program for 16 years, initially joining as a year-long AmeriCorps member in the small town of Winston before becoming a program coordinator and later an executive director, a position he holds currently. His identity, he said, is largely defined by RARE.
His tenure with the program, however, might soon be ending.
On April 25, 2025, the RARE program received a grant termination letter informing them that the federal government would no longer provide it with funding, effective immediately. Their members were given a 30-day “wind down” period, and on May 28, were put on a payment pause and told to submit their end-of-service materials.
The decision was part of a larger cost-cutting effort by the newly formed Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), which axed funding to the federal AmeriCorps agency, which has been around since 1993 as a stipend volunteer program for college graduates. The RARE program was in its 31st year of service when it received the termination letter.
Many state AmeriCorps programs have fought back. An injunction to challenge the decision was filed on behalf of Oregon and 22 other states shortly after the news broke. In early June, a judge upheld the injunction. That means the RARE program has funding to pay its members through July, which is when their service year ends. It does not guarantee funding for next year.
Despite the win, the damage to RARE is already done, Tomlinson said.
“[This freeze] has resulted in us losing well over 50% of our members,” Tomlinson said.
Many of his members, who are often recent college graduates in their first professional job, decided to leave rather than wait and see if the injunction would be upheld.
“If the rug was pulled out from underneath you, like the way it’s been pulled out from underneath our members and our host sites and my team, it makes sense that people would want to get off this roller coaster,” he said.
That’s what Emily Embleton decided to do.
A second-year RARE AmeriCorps member, Embleton was three months away from completing her 11-month term working with southern Oregon’s Rogue Food Unites when the funding freeze hit.
She was in the middle of producing a toolkit for how other communities can create no-cost, no-barrier farmers markets like the one Rogue Food Unites runs. But she was unable to finish this project. At the end of May, Embleton decided to leave her AmeriCorps position.
“That felt really bad,” she said. “I mean, walking away from a small nonprofit that’s really at capacity with incomplete projects felt awful.”
Embleton said she applauds the members of her cohort who stuck around in case the injunction worked out, but for her, it all felt too uncertain to stay.
“This all felt really sudden and unstable for me, and so I did my last day on the 28th [of May],” she said.
The remaining members who waited out the freeze will be able to finish their term of service thanks to the injunction, but the program’s future looks dark. Tomlinson and the rest of his team decided to cancel next year’s RARE programming because it’s unlikely they’ll receive the grants they need to pay for it.
“We had to let go of 103 member applications and 53 host sites that had applied to bring a member out,” Tomlinson said. “We were gearing up for a big year.”
Rural Oregon could take a big hit because of the loss of these future members.
Many organizations in rural areas – whether they be non-profit or governmental – run at lower capacity than their urban counterparts because of a lack of staffing and money to spend on projects. That’s where programs like RARE can fill the gap, providing employees to organizations that would otherwise be unable to afford an addition to their team.
But the loss of RARE means the capacity of some organizations with just one or two full-time staff members could be cut in half.
That’s the case for Lauren Michele Kraemer, an associate professor of practice for the College of Health with Oregon State University Extension Service in Hood River and Wasco Counties.
Her research focuses on food systems, chronic disease prevention, and climate resiliency.
Kraemer has hosted AmeriCorps members for most of the last 15 years because they can work on the dream projects she normally doesn’t have the capacity for.
“In my work, I’ll identify programs or challenges or community health issues I want to address,” Kraemer said. “A lot of times I’ll put them on a sticky note and think, gosh, if I have capacity or enough bandwidth or a full-time employee someday, these are some of the pie-in-the-sky projects I’d love to get to.”
The years she’s assigned an AmeriCorps member are when Kraemer “pulls those sticky notes off the wall” and turns them into a job description. That’s what she did this past year with her current AmeriCorps RARE member, Grace Wesson, who was instrumental in launching a wildfire smoke readiness website for rural communities in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge.
“They’re able to do some really cool things that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to make happen or realize,” Kraemer said.
She knows firsthand how life-changing an AmeriCorps placement can be: she originally moved to Oregon because of a one-year AmeriCorps term she completed fresh out of college. While that position was not affiliated with RARE, she said the opportunity is what kick-started her public health career.
“It’s what inspired me to pursue my masters in Public Health from Oregon State University, and was really the reason I moved to Oregon and the [Columbia River] Gorge, where I’ve grown roots and grown my family,” Kraemer said.
Kraemer had planned to host a RARE member next year, but now won’t be able to. She expects the effect of this cancellation to be twofold: one on the AmeriCorps members, who lose out on the professional development experience, and the other on rural Oregon, which won’t benefit from the projects these young professionals could have implemented.
“That loss will be felt, I think, for a long time, because I’m not sure what’s going to be able to take the place of programs like that,” Kraemer said.
For Tomlinson, the funding freeze means he’ll likely be job searching come fall.
“This has taken a program that has served rural Oregon for nearly 31 years and has shocked the systems as hard as it could to essentially shut us down moving forward,” Tomlinson said.
“It’s definitely been an interesting experience to realize that despite all of these years of service, we still have some pretty fragile systems.”
Related
Republish This Story Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://dailyyonder.com/doge-cuts-debilitate-rural-oregons-americorps-program/2025/07/22/
Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/
