IA AmeriCorps Formula Grant

The IA AmeriCorps Formula Grant, offered by Volunteer Iowa, aims to enhance community service and volunteering in underserved areas. This grant prioritizes projects that serve communities facing poverty, improve youth mental health access, support veterans, and promote environmental stewardship. Organizations that engage AmeriCorps members in these critical areas can receive funding to foster civic engagement and build resilient communities, ultimately contributing to national service efforts across the state.

AmeriCorps improves lives, strengthens communities, and fosters civic engagement through service and volunteering. AmeriCorps brings people together to tackle some of the country’s most pressing challenges through national service and volunteerism. AmeriCorps members serve with organizations dedicated to the improvement of communities and those serving. AmeriCorps grants are awarded to eligible organizations that engage AmeriCorps members in evidence-based or evidence-informed interventions to strengthen communities. An AmeriCorps members are people who provide community service through AmeriCorps. Members may receive a living allowance and other benefits. After successful completion of their service, members earn a Segal AmeriCorps Education Award they can use to pay for higher education expenses or apply to qualified student loans.
For this funding opportunity, AmeriCorps will prioritize consideration from organizations that:
Serve Communities:  Serve communities with concentrated poverty, rural communities, tribal communities, and historically underrepresented and underserved individuals. These may include people of color, immigrants, refugees, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people with arrest or conviction records, religious minorities, etc.;  Implement programs for or expand access to high-quality youth mental health and substance use recovery services and prepare AmeriCorps members to enter behavioral health careers. These may include individuals with lived experience with substance use and mental health challenges to support youth mental health efforts and continued AmeriCorps work on the opioid epidemic;  Focus on improving the quality of life for veterans, active-duty members of the Armed Forces, and their families by recruiting veterans, military spouses, and their older children into national service; Promote environmental stewardship to help communities (especially underserved households and communities) to be more resilient by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, conserving land and water, increasing renewable energy use and improving at-risk ecosystems;  Support civic bridgebuilding programs and projects to reduce polarization and community divisions; and provide training in civic bridgebuilding skills and techniques to AmeriCorps members;