National Civilian Community Corps

The National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC), or AmeriCorps NCCC, is an AmeriCorps program founded in 1993 that engages 18- to 26-year-olds in team-based, residential community service projects across the United States. Each year, approximately 2,200 individuals representative of all colors, creeds, states, and economic statuses are chosen to serve in one of four regions covering all 50 states and five territories.

The mission of AmeriCorps NCCC is "to strengthen communities and develop leaders through direct, team-based national and community service." Each year, NCCC members complete a total of over 1.2 million hours of service across hundreds of projects in the areas of disaster response, infrastructure improvement, environmental conservation, energy conservation, and urban and rural development.

Inception
The National Civilian Community Corps is loosely based on the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a New Deal-era work relief program founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to employ young men left jobless by the Great Depression. Run by officers of the United States Army Reserve, the CCC employed three million men aged 18 to 26 across tens of thousands of projects related to environmental conservation and natural resource development. By the time the program was discontinued in 1942, CCC members had planted more than 3 billion trees, built nearly 100,000 miles of fire roads, and erected drainage systems for over 80 million acres of agricultural land.

In the early 1990s, the end of the Cold War sparked renewed interest in volunteerism and in the idea of using surplus military resources to solve domestic problems. In 1992, a bipartisan group of senators including John McCain, Harris Wofford, Bob Dole, and Barbara Mikulski inserted provisions into the National Defense Authorization Act of 1993 authorizing the creation of a “Civilian Community Corps Demonstration Program” to test the viability of resurrecting the CCC model as a response to contemporary problems. The following year, President Bill Clinton signed legislation creating the Corporation for National and Community Service (also known as AmeriCorps), which absorbed the nascent Corps as well as other pre-existing programs such as VISTA.

Early development
The first class of 850 NCCC members was sworn in by President Clinton at a White House ceremony on September 13, 1994. Like its New Deal-era forerunner, the new program was closely linked to the military: it was administered by a staff of officers recommended by the Secretary of Defense, and Corps units were trained and housed at campuses owned by the Department of Defense.

The original five campuses were located in San Diego, California; Charleston, South Carolina; Denver, Colorado; Perry Point, Maryland; and Washington, D.C. Each campus served as headquarters for a region covering multiple states. Between 1994 and 1999, more than 20,000 individuals applied to serve with NCCC, but only 6,000 were accepted due to budget constraints. Over the course of a typical program year, NCCC teams would complete between 300 and 400 projects focused on “environmental activities, education, human needs, and disaster response.” A majority of projects would be sponsored by nonprofit organizations, roughly a quarter by federal, state, and local government entities, and the rest by educational organizations and other institutions fitting the NCCC mandate. Frequent sponsoring organizations included Habitat for Humanity, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, YMCA, and The Nature Conservancy.

Disaster response soon became an important area of focus for NCCC. In its first five years, the Corps developed strong relationships with FEMA, the American Red Cross, and the U.S. Forest Service. By 1999, roughly 11% of NCCC projects saw teams working with these organizations to respond to hurricanes, forest fires, and other natural disasters. In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, 80% of NCCC teams across all five regions were pulled from their projects to aid in the response. Over the following four years, more than 4,000 NCCC members would serve on relief and recovery projects throughout the impacted region.

In 2006, then-President George W. Bush proposed a federal budget which would have eliminated NCCC, but the proposal was ultimately not adopted.

2007 – present
In 2007, the Charleston campus closed down and responsibility for the region was divided among other campuses. A new campus opened in Vinton, Iowa the following year, by which point the Washington, D.C. campus had also closed down and the San Diego campus had relocated to Sacramento. In 2009, the newest NCCC campus was opened in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Perry Point campus relocated to Baltimore in 2014 before closing down four years later.

Disaster relief remains a significant priority for NCCC. Teams have been deployed in response to events such as Hurricane Sandy and the 2011 Joplin tornado, and between 2012 and 2019, half of all projects involved disaster services. In 2012, NCCC launched an official partnership with FEMA that led to the creation of FEMA Corps, which adapts the NCCC model to concentrate exclusively on disaster relief efforts. FEMA Corps members “are dedicated to FEMA deployments in areas of logistics, disaster survivor assistance, individual and public assistance, and recovery.” In 2022, the partnership was formally extended for another five years.

In 2023, NCCC announced a new “Summer of Service” program which allows members to serve for three months rather than a full ten. Later that year, as part of President Biden’s Climate Corps initiative, NCCC struck an arrangement with the U.S. Forest Service to create Forest Corps. Beginning in the summer of 2024, Forest Corps teams will assist the Forest Service in conducting conservation projects such as fuels reduction, trail maintenance, prescribed burns, and wildlife surveys.

Program overview
AmeriCorps NCCC is divided into four regions, each covering multiple states and territories. These include the Pacific Region, headquartered in Sacramento and covering most of the Far West, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and American Samoa; the Southwest Region, headquartered in Aurora, Colorado and covering several of the West South Central states as well as Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming; the North Central region, headquartered in Vinton, Iowa and covering the Midwest, Pennsylvania, New York, and northern New England; and the Southern Region, headquartered in Vicksburg, Mississippi and covering the Southeast as well as New Jersey, southern New England, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The regions operate with considerable autonomy, recruiting their own members and selecting their own projects.

To ensure that teams are available year-round, regions operate on staggered, ten-month cycles. Each region is assigned a season (Summer, Fall, or Winter) that fluctuates based on need. In 2024, both the Southwest and North Central regions will receive summer recruits. The term is divided into three or four service rounds lasting from seven to fourteen weeks; each round typically corresponds to one project, although some teams may split the round between two or more projects.

Individuals apply to serve either as Corps Members or Team Leaders. At the start of the term, those chosen to serve report to their regional campus, where they are assigned to a team and trained in tool management, first aid, conflict resolution, and other skills. After the training period, teams are dispatched to their first projects, generally returning to campus to transition between rounds. At the end of the term, those who successfully complete the program with the requisite number of service hours graduate in an on-campus ceremony.

Structure
At the start of the service term, each team consists of one Team Leader and eight to ten Corps Members. The Team Leader serves as the liaison between the team, the project sponsor, and NCCC staff, and is responsible for ensuring the safety and well-being of the team as well as adherence to NCCC policies and procedures. Teams are organized into Units of five to seven, each headed by a Unit Leader. Every campus has one Region Director and three Deputy Region Directors.

Projects
Each region selects projects round-by-round from a pool of applications submitted from within its geographical purview. Only nonprofits, faith-based organizations, schools, government entities, and public land trusts may be selected as project sponsors. Sponsors are required to provide teams with a work plan, on-site supervision, and lodging which includes showers and cooking facilities.

While on deployment, teams work, live, eat, and sleep together. Each team is provided with a 15-passenger van for transportation purposes as well as an allowance for purchasing food and supplies. As of 2019, approximately half of all NCCC projects were primarily concerned with disaster response, one-quarter with urban and rural development, one-fifth with environmental conservation, and the rest with infrastructure improvement or energy conservation. It is common for the same sponsor to host multiple teams over the course of several years; a study of 5,004 projects between 2012 and 2019 identified only 1,439 unique project sponsors. Projects vary widely in scope and scale, and the work can encompass a broad array of tasks and responsibilities such as tutoring schoolchildren, clearing away invasive species, building affordable housing, and helping community members file their taxes.

Benefits and requirements
In order to serve, all NCCC members must be citizens or lawful permanent residents of the United States over the age of 18. Corps Members may be no older than 26, while there is no upper age limit for Team Leaders. In order to graduate from the program, all members must complete 1,700 hours of community service over a ten-month period. At least 80 of these hours must come in the form of Independent Service Projects (ISPs), which Corps Members seek out for themselves while in the field (Team Leaders are exempt from this requirement).

NCCC members may choose to resign from the program at any time. While serving, members receive room and board, uniforms, limited health benefits, and a modest, taxable stipend for other living expenses. Members are required to refrain from using federally illegal drugs such as marijuana, and are subject to random drug tests.

Those who successfully complete the program are eligible to receive a Segal AmeriCorps Education Award, which can be used to pay tuition costs at qualified institutions of higher education, for educational training, or to repay qualified student loans. The award amount is considered taxable income and is equal to the maximum value of the Pell Grant ($7,395 as of Fiscal Year 2023). Individuals can only receive Education Awards for two terms of AmeriCorps service. Generally speaking, individuals who leave the program early forfeit their claim to the Award, but those who depart for “compelling personal circumstances” may be eligible for a partial award at the discretion of the Region Director.

Impact and criticism
A 2022 survey found that 87% of project sponsors believed “to a large or moderate extent” that NCCC teams strengthened the communities in which they served, while 89% believed that NCCC helped them accomplish their objectives in a shorter period of time. In 2009, then-Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour hailed NCCC’s response to Hurricane Katrina, saying that teams had rendered “tremendous service” to the Gulf Coast’s recovery efforts.

However, NCCC has also come under substantial criticism, with many arguing that its costs are exorbitantly high relative to its impact. In 2006, President Bush’s proposal to eliminate NCCC drew support from some fiscal conservatives, with U.S. Representative Jerry Lewis calling the program “very costly and poorly administered” and libertarian activist James Bovard calling it a wasteful “boondoggle”. In 2016, AmeriCorps’s own Inspector General published a sharply critical assessment, finding that NCCC suffers from high attrition and low enrollment rates, and that its services “cost the taxpayers four to eight times more than the same services by…other AmeriCorps programs” yet “achieve no better long-term outcomes.” The report recommended that AmeriCorps divert funds away from NCCC and towards other programs like VISTA and Senior Corps, which it deemed more cost-effective. In response, NCCC leadership stated that because of NCCC’s residential nature, it is “[u]nlike any other national service program,” and that “direct comparisons to other national service programs are difficult and cannot adequately capture” the program’s value.

List of National Directors
** Indicates that the individual initially assumed the National Directorship in an Acting capacity