Wisconsin Hooked on AmeriCorps

Recently, groups and officials around the state (and nation) celebrated AmeriCorps Week. including Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, the Sheboygan mayor, various colleges and other state beneficiaries of the federal program. In March, Governor Walker gave service awards to Wisconsin AmeriCorps workers, no surprise since the governor appoints the Serve Wisconsin 22 member citizen body. And even federal Republican lawmakers, after vowing to cut the $6 billion AmeriCorps program, decided to shrink its budget by only 6.7 percent.

Where does this deeply rooted federal program come from?
AmeriCorps was born in 1993 when President Clinton signed the National Community Service Trust Act. The national service program received a 50% boost from President George W. Bush, and exploded when President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act in 2009, expanding 75,000 positions to 250,000 by 2017.

This year Wisconsin AmeriCorps will provide more than 2,500 positions, costing more than $26,400,000 to support Wisconsin communities through national AmeriCorps initiatives. The mainly taxpayer funded program is a community organizer's dream, paying people in Wisconsin and elsewhere to work and coordinate volunteers for non-profits, government entities, colleges and schools.

So, what is wrong with this national service program?
With bipartisan support, the program has morphed into an all-purpose progressive slush fund, writes pundit Michelle Malkin. She exposes its recent push to actively sell more people on signing up for food stamps. As the saying goes, the more (dependent people), the merrier (the government bureocracy).

And AmeriCorps works hard to sell itself and grow. To influence public perception, the program even uses its own lingo. Wisconsin Healthcorps document, AmeriCorps & Wisconsin HealthCorps: an Introduction, suggests that workers should be called members, not volunteers, interns, students or employees. What members do is to be referred to as service, not jobs or volunteer positions. Member renumeration must be called a living allowance, not wage, salery or paycheck. And the places members serve must be known as service sites, not work or job sites. These terms are tools to make taxpayers forget this is just another unsustainable government program.

Most importantly, volunteering is alive and well in America without the federal government raising a civilian corps of paid volunteers to work in lock-step with its own self-interest. But who is willing to say it when our local friends, neighbors and family members make up the nice face of AmeriCorps, and the program's P/R includes juicy "cost impact estimates" no locality can refuse? This is exactly the way the government disarms our criticism and grows its own size, reach and influence.