Rajean Bossier had always loved teaching but never pursued it professionally — so when the 67-year-old Renoite saw a job posting to serve as a literacy mentor in her community, she jumped at the opportunity.

Since November, Bossier has been a member of AmeriCorps, the federal program that provides stipends to Americans doing volunteer work across the country. She worked three days a week at Reno’s Echo Loder Elementary School through the United Readers program, a partnership between AmeriCorps and the United Way of Northern Nevada and the Sierra (UWNNS). 

Bossier loved the work and the ability to make a difference — in a matter of months, she said, the children she mentored went from walking in with their heads down to being more confident readers and raising their hands more often in class.

But on Monday, Bossier was called into a meeting with her fellow mentors and was told that their federal grant had been terminated. Their AmeriCorps service was effectively over.

“I just dread having to tell the kids,” Bossier said in an interview with The Nevada Independent. “I wish somebody at least had had the heart to wait for another month when the school year would have been over.”

Up to 200 AmeriCorps members in Nevada abruptly lost their jobs Monday after the Trump administration ordered an immediate stop to federally funded work, affecting eight organizations across the state. Nationally, 41 percent of the agency’s budget was eliminated Friday and close to 33,000 AmeriCorps members were pulled from their service. 

Grant recipients were told that their work no longer fit with AmeriCorps’ priorities amid DOGE’s effort to cut government spending.

From February 2024 to February 2025, AmeriCorps spent $10.1 million and sent 1,865 members to serve in Nevada at close to 200 sites, working on everything from wildfire mitigation to school reading initiatives.

But on Friday, the Department of Government Efficiency terminated about $400 million worth of AmeriCorps grants and ordered partners to cease all grant-related activities — with no possibility for appeal. Democratic attorneys general in 24 states, including Nevada’s Aaron Ford, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the Trump administration over the cuts, calling them unlawful and asking for an injunction.

On Monday, Nevada Volunteers, the state service commission that administers AmeriCorps funding, notified eight of the state’s 13 programs that their grants had been terminated. The partner organizations, in turn, notified their AmeriCorps members that their service positions were no longer funded, leaving them to return home from their sites. 

A number of the AmeriCorps programs that the Trump administration cut grants to were focused on education — desperately needed in a state that ranks in the bottom quartile for high school graduation rate, chronic absenteeism and eighth-grade reading level.

The eight organizations in Nevada that lost grants are:

• City of Las Vegas
• Nevada Outdoor School
• United Way of Northern Nevada and the Sierra
• United Way of Southern Nevada
• The Good Deed Project
• Improve Your Tomorrow
• City of Henderson
• Healthy Communities Coalition of Lyon & Storey Counties

Monday was tearful for both United Way staff and the AmeriCorps members at the meeting where the members were informed that their positions had been cut. 

“I got to stand in front of 35 amazing individuals and look them in the eyes and tell them that all of the impactful work that they were doing was no longer going to be allowed to be done,” Krystal Nevada, the senior director of United Readers, said through tears in an interview. “My mentors were crying. One of them mentioned to me when they left, ‘I'm not sad for myself. I feel like I'm abandoning my students.’”

Inside the cuts

The City of Las Vegas sent all 64 of its AmeriCorps members home from their service sites Monday, many of whom were working in Clark County schools as mentors providing educational support with a focus on literacy, nutrition and chronic absenteeism, among other issues, according to an email obtained by The Nevada Independent. 

At UWNNS, just weeks before the end of the school year, program directors had to let go of 40 AmeriCorps members working on literacy improvement with elementary schoolers across Northern Nevada. 

And at Improve Your Tomorrow, a nonprofit that works to improve college attendance and graduation rates among young men of color, plans to work with 200 students in East Las Vegas are in limbo after the federal government cut a grant of $150,000.

Zanny Marsh, the executive director of Nevada Volunteers, said the cuts will be devastating both to Nevada — which stands to lose out on the educational and environmental strides that AmeriCorps programs have enabled — and to the members themselves. 

Marsh said that over a 10-month period of service, AmeriCorps members receive a living allowance of about $17,000. Because they are classified as volunteers, those recently sent home are ineligible to claim unemployment. For completing their national service, AmeriCorps alumni can receive an education award of up to about $7,400 for school expenses and student loan repayments — but now, with their term of service cut short, members will be ineligible.

While some, such as Bessier, volunteer with AmeriCorps as retirees, many members are recent high school or college graduates looking to start their careers in service work and rely on the stipend as their main form of income.

“Those members make sacrifices,” Marsh said. “And right now, we’ve got members that are essentially without a plan.”

Nevada Volunteers and partner organizations that lost funding have appealed to the state’s congressional delegation, the governor’s office, the Legislature and local governments to attempt to make up some of the lost funding. Marsh said the state’s senators and the governor have been supporters and are sensitive to the abruptness of the cuts, and program administrators are hopeful that they will be able to find other funding streams.

But with state revenues projected to be low and federal grants being cut across the state, organizations are facing an uphill battle to replace their funds. Already, some are projecting cuts to next year’s programs. 

Blake Pang, the CEO of UWNNS, said that without AmeriCorps funding, the United Readers program will only be able to serve half of the Washoe County students it planned to for next school year.

“Cycling down from a hope for 2,000 [students] to 700 to 800 is a pretty big loss for the state,” he said.

‘Big step backwards’

Using phonemic awareness with kindergarteners through 3rd graders, United Readers has been making significant strides towards improving elementary school literacy. In the 2023-24 school year, 90 percent of participating students achieved at least one full reading level of growth, while the average student went up 2.5 levels. 

AmeriCorps funded about 45 percent of the program, with United Readers and the state — which authorized $600,000 in the 2023 legislative session — made up the rest. This school year, United Readers has been operating in 21 schools with 40 mentors, who earn $21 per hour (AmeriCorps provides about $9 per hour through its portion of the funding). 

United Readers will use its reserves to fund the mentoring program for two more weeks, so that mentors can complete student assessments, but the organization will be left to either make cuts or find different funding sources for next school year.

UWNNS wanted to significantly expand the program next year. State Sen. Angie Taylor (D-Reno) has a bill that would provide $1.4 million in state funding — including expanding the program to Southern Nevada — but even if that comes through, United Readers will only be able to fund 30 mentors in 12 to 14 schools next year without federal funding. 

“We were thinking that this thing was going to grow [from] the most successful and most efficient program in just in our region, to [be] that for the entire state,” Pang said. “It's a travesty that we're going to take this big step backwards when the kiddos need it more than ever.”

Meanwhile, for organizations such as Improve Your Tomorrow (IYT), the AmeriCorps cuts have halted future opportunities for mentorship in Las Vegas. IYT matches boys of color in sixth through 12th grade with mentors, after-school workshops and study hall opportunities to promote college and career readiness. 

Operating in three states, IYT CEO Michael Lynch intentionally chose Nevada as the next state for the program to expand to because its high school and college graduation rates for young men of color — and for Black and Native students in particular — lags dismally behind the state average.

AmeriCorps awarded IYT with a planning grant of more than $150,000, with the opportunity to receive an operations grant of more than $260,000 afterwards. IYT planned to operate in East Las Vegas’ Western High School and El Dorado High School, hiring six AmeriCorps mentors to serve 200 students. The organization had already hired an executive director, who had spent the past few weeks hiring staff in Las Vegas.

With the grant terminated, Lynch is now looking to the city, county and donors to make up the funding — but acknowledges that the cut leaves a “really big fiscal gap for us to make up.”

“These are folks who are just focused on serving the needs of our most vulnerable,” Lynch said. “So to me, it seems draconian and irresponsible that the Trump administration would end service for 33,000 people who are serving hundreds of thousands of people every day.”

This story was updated at 7:40 a.m. on 4/30/25 to remove the Walker Basin Conservancy from the list of affected organizations. The Walker Basin Conservancy was no longer hosting an AmeriCorps program when the cuts occurred.