WELLFLEET — AmeriCorps, the federal agency that funds community service projects, has terminated $530,000 in grants for work on the Outer Cape undertaken by AmeriCorps Cape Cod (ACC) and through Helping Our Women (HOW), the Eastham and Provincetown nonprofit. The two groups received news of the cancelations on April 25 and April 27.
The action by DOGE, the so-called Dept. of Government Efficiency, has sent county leaders and organization directors scrambling to preserve the jobs of AmeriCorps members who work on projects ranging from cemetery cleanups to compiling air quality data to natural disaster relief preparedness. The ACC program is administered by the Barnstable County regional government.
The Barnstable County commissioners voted unanimously on May 1 to fund AmeriCorps Cape Cod through the current service year, which ends in August. The canceled $500,000 federal grant provided about half of ACC’s annual operating expenses, program manager Misty Niemeyer told the Independent.
The regional government plans to rehire the current members as “temporary emergency employees” until August, she said, paying them $15 per hour. But the county has not yet secured funding for the next service year, Niemeyer said. For the next three months, the program will be called “Cape Cod Corps,” she added.
Mass. Attorney General Andrea Campbell has joined 23 other state attorneys general in a lawsuit to reverse the AmeriCorps grant cancelations.
Jobs Are Cut at HOW
Helping Our Women is searching for alternative sources of funds for its terminated grant, said Executive Director Gwynne Guzzeau. The organization’s board voted in April to add a budget line that might cover the cost of two AmeriCorps members.
“I believe we will find donor support to offset it,” Guzzeau said.
HOW provides transportation, financial assistance, and food access support to women with chronic health conditions. The number of clients has ballooned to more than 300, Guzzeau said, since it started hosting AmeriCorps members in 2017.
HOW received a $30,000 award through AmeriCorps VISTA, a separate program that directs funds to nonprofits and public agencies. In an April 25 email, AmeriCorps interim head Jennifer Bastress Tahmasebi told Guzzeau that “effective immediately, the above-referenced AmeriCorps award is being terminated. … It has been determined that your award no longer effectuates agency priorities. You must immediately cease all award activities. This is a final agency action and is not administratively appealable.”
The terminated grant paid for two full-time VISTA members at HOW, Guzzeau said: community food project coordinator Maddie Kahle and volunteer resource developer Pam Mahoney. HOW’s full-time staff dropped from five to three.
Guzzeau said the award funded six placements in all: the two HOW positions and another four at other local community service organizations. HOW acts as an intermediary for them.
Past hosts include the Lily House hospice in Wellfleet and Sharing Kindness, a grief support group. Three other HOW partners were preparing to host AmeriCorps members in the next year: Sustainable CAPE, Truro Community Kitchen, and the Family Table Collaborative.
“The AmeriCorps worker would have enabled us to create more partnerships and get more food to more people,” said Sustainable CAPE Director Francie Randolph.
“We were just about to post the position, and then the program was cut,” said Wendy Lurie, co-founder of Truro Community Kitchen.
Kahle, 25, lives in Wellfleet. She moved to the Cape as an AmeriCorps member in 2023 and manages the organization’s mobile food pantry, a program Guzzeau said could not exist without her.
“We didn’t have that before the VISTAs came,” Guzzeau said. “It’s grown tremendously because of Family Pantry of Cape Cod. They deliver to Provincetown or Eastham, and our volunteers bring it to people’s homes.”
Kahle and Mahoney received emails on April 28 saying that their AmeriCorps placements were on “administrative hold.” They were given until May 19 to secure “suitable reassignment” to a project that had not been canceled. If they did not find reassignment, “your AmeriCorps service will be terminated,” the emails said.
Kahle said she had been preparing for the news and was “disappointed, but not necessarily surprised.”
“The cuts affect everyone in our community,” said Lurie, “because we planned to use that money to work with other local agencies to figure out where there are gaps in services on the Outer Cape,” work that they had already begun in Truro. “That’s why it’s so heartbreaking.”
HOW is trying to fund Kahle’s and Mahoney’s positions, Guzzeau said. That would mean adding $37,000 to its annual budget. The nonprofit has not found replacement funds for the other four “subsite” positions.
“We’re not going to let this screw key programs,” Guzzeau said.
The ACC members on the Outer Cape are Samantha Wilmot, 27, Brendan Williamson, 29, and Anthony Baez, 23; their supervisor is Henry Torpey, 24. The three members work at the Cape Cod National Seashore, the Marine Fisheries Research program at the Center for Coastal Studies, and the Nauset Regional Middle School, respectively.
They live in Wellfleet in a house owned by the Cape Cod National Seashore, which has allowed the Barnstable County regional government to lease it.
Compliance Didn’t Matter
One reason Kahle wasn’t surprised by the cuts, she said, was a notice that HOW received in February directing the nonprofit to comply with President Trump’s executive orders related to gender and diversity.
On Feb. 19, Guzzeau received an email saying the organization needed to comply with the Administration’s Jan. 20 executive orders on “defending women from gender ideology extremism” and “ending radical and wasteful government D.E.I. programs” to continue receiving funds.
Guzzeau said she reluctantly complied with the order and removed a statement on HOW’s website that said, “We serve women and anyone who identifies as a woman, nonbinary, or trans.”
“It didn’t feel good at all,” Guzzeau said. “Nobody said I had to. But my job as the executive director is to figure out, based on the policy and the guidance of the board, how do we navigate and thread this needle?” Ultimately, she said, the funding from VISTA programs was too vital to the organization to risk losing through noncompliance.
Like HOW, the Family Table Collaborative and Sustainable CAPE complied with the orders, but the funding for their VISTA placements was still terminated.
The board of one of HOW’s partners, however, chose not to comply. Lily House, which provides end-of-life care, declined to renew its contract with HOW to avoid having to comply with the executive orders.
“There’s no question for us that we could not comply,” said Lily House Executive Director Dawn Walsh. “It’s 100-percent antithetical to the core values that the Lily House holds.”
As a result, Walsh said, AmeriCorps member Heather Rhea, who had been a volunteer coordinator for 19 months, left the organization in March.
Complying with the executive orders didn’t matter, ultimately, as all of HOW’s designated VISTA funding was cut regardless of whether the sites had certified compliance.
Now that HOW has no need to comply with the orders, Guzzeau said, the deleted statement will go back on the organization’s website.
