Phoebe Serlemitsos and more than a dozen other AmeriCorps team leaders spent the morning of April 15 doing resiliency and conflict resolution training at the Aurora campus of the national service and volunteer agency.
They were scheduled to head out for their next project in a few days.
“Then, at 12:30, we were told, ‘Come to the gym.’ And that’s when they told us that everyone was being d emo b i l i z e d and they were going to send us home,” Serlemitsos told the Pikes Peak Bulletin by phone.
Among the programs that were cut was one that pays 18- to 26-year-old participants, called members, a small stipend and travel expenses, and provides room and board in exchange for service.
Within hours, all of the members had departed.
“Everyone was upset that it ended,” Serlemitsos said. Members had lost their stipend, and the food and housing they would have had until their year of service ended on July 17. Some left for situations that were not as secure.
The hallways of the Aurora campus were piled high with uniforms and equipment that were left behind. Food for members, team leaders and staff was thrown out.
The team leaders were told that they couldn’t stay at the Aurora campus beyond that night – which is how 14 AmeriCorps leaders ended up in Kat Gayle’s Colorado Springs living room for a couple of nights.
Gayle – an attorney who regularly speaks at Colorado Springs City Council meetings, ran for an at-large Council seat in 2023 and for the Colorado House of Representatives’ District 14 in November last year – is Serlemitsos’ cousin.
“I called her, explained the situation, and she said, ‘Yeah, I’ll find a space for all 14 of you to sleep for a few nights,'” Serlemitsos said.
Gayle enlisted the help of some of her neighbors to take in several of the marooned AmeriCorps workers and got someone on the East Coast to wire money to help feed them.
Between the White House announcing that it was cutting nearly $400 million in grant funding for AmeriCorps’ programs and Gayle offering her living room as temporary accommodations, mere hours had passed.
Colorado Springs programs feel the blow
When the cuts hit Americorps, members in Colorado Springs were working with the Catamount Institute, which provides outdoor education and adventures to youth; Kids on Bikes, which uses cycling to encourage children to lead healthy, active, and happy lives; and the Rocky Mountain Field Institute, which works to conserve public lands in Southern Colorado. Serlemitsos’ cohort had helped families in Pueblo do their taxes and worked on fire mitigation in Salida.
If the members had completed a full year of service, they would have been awarded financial assistance for college, graduate studies, or to pay off student loans. But they were sent home roughly three months short of a full year of service, meaning they won’t receive the full education award.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement cited by several media outlets that AmeriCorps had “failed eight consecutive audits” and was a “target-rich environment for President Trump’s agenda to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse.”
However, studies analyzing the costs versus benefits of AmeriCorps’ programs show a return on investment of up to $34.26 for every federal dollar spent.
“This program exists solely for the purpose of helping people,” demobilized AmeriCorps member Andrew Clater wrote on X. “I spend my days doing taxes for free for low-income families. Other members work at transitional housing for homeless kids. But in the name of government efficiency, they cut a program that consists of .02% of the FY2025” budget.
We wanted to finish our year. We just want to serve. – Phoebe Serlemitsos
The nonprofit American Services Commission, which supports AmeriCorps programs, has launched an emergency fund to help demobilized members.
Colorado sues
Colorado is one of the lead parties to a multi state lawsuit against the Trump administration over the dismantling of AmeriCorps.
By gutting the agency, the lawsuit says, the administration “usurped Congress’s power of the purse,” which violates the Constitution’s separation of powers clause. Congress created AmeriCorps in 1993.
The abrupt shuttering of AmeriCorps also allegedly ignored a legal requirement for public notice and the opportunity for the public to comment before significant changes were made to Americorps’ programs.
“The Administration … cannot simply terminate the agency’s functions by [decree] or defund the agency in defiance of administrative procedures, Congressional appropriations, and the Constitutional separation of powers,” says the complaint filed in Maryland on April 29.
Deputy Press Secretary for the Governor’s Office Eric Maruyama said in a statement emailed to the Pikes Peak Bulletin that axing AmeriCorps “pull(ed) the rug out from under Coloradans … while destroying an important pipeline to train the next generation of firefighters, teachers, and mental health professionals.”
“These cuts … weaken our economy and workforce, and increase wildfire risk to our communities,” he said.
In 2024, Colorado’s nearly 1,400 AmeriCorps members served at over 700 local sites statewide. Recently, members had been working with the Forest Service and national and state parks, doing work that Rangers did before many of them were laid off by the Department of Government Efficiency in February, Serlemitsos said.
“They just had to find housing for us,” she said.
When Serlemitsos left Colorado Springs on April 19, she didn’t head home. She and many of her colleagues went to an urban farm in Wyoming – on their own dime – to continue improving lives and strengthening communities through service.
“We wanted to finish our year,” Serlemitsos said. “We just want to serve.”
In our “Trump 2.0” series, we’re telling the stories of Pikes Peak region and Colorado residents whose lives have been impacted by the slew of executive directives issued by President Donald Trump in his second term.
