AmeriCorps Is Being Used to Indoctrinate Participants With DEI In Violation Of Trump’s Executive Order
In his Republican National Convention acceptance speech, former President Ronald Reagan called for a restoration of the “American spirit of voluntary service, of cooperation, of private and community initiative; a spirit that flows like a deep and mighty river through the history of our nation.”
As many as 200,000 individuals each year answer this noble call to participate in America’s national service program, AmeriCorps, serving as members and volunteers across its various community service offshoots, only to be put through training modules that poison the very spirit of our nation.
Training programs to enter AmeriCorps have been explicitly teaching participants diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) concepts that indoctrinate them into having an anti-American worldview; one that believes that the systems and institutions of our country were designed in such a way to benefit some and disadvantage others.
AmeriCorps partners such as Public Allies teach their corps members that it’s insufficient to be “not racist” or “against racism,” they must become “anti-racist,” which means they must actively work during their service years and after to tear down the systems and institutions of America that they’re told hold racism and all the other “isms” in place so they can build new ones that are more “equitable.” This is in direct violation of President Donald Trump’s recent executive order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” in which he declared that all DEI activities like this in the federal government should be terminated and their funding pulled.
AmeriCorps is a DEI Gravy Train
Last year, AmeriCorps announced a whopping $370 million funding boost to support 300 “Innovative Programs Across the Nation,” which American taxpayers are funding only to create radical activists and future leaders who will work to dismantle and destroy our nation. Public Allies, mentioned above, is just one of the organizations churning them out.
City Year is an organization that since the inception of AmeriCorps has sent service volunteers to work as peer tutors to low-performing schools in different communities across the nation. To prepare members for service, volunteers are put through their basic training academy.
Training in what? Diversity, equity, and inclusion.
One City Year participant who signed up to serve in the Dallas Independent School District recounts the “eye-opening” privilege line exercise she and other corps members had to do as part of their DEI training to determine who was more privileged based on their skin color and wealth:
During the first month of training, the corps participated in a privilege line exercise which involved taking steps forward or backward to statements like “if you have experienced prejudice because of the color of your skin, take two steps backward.” The purpose behind it was to demonstrate how corps members come from diverse social backgrounds, some being very wealthy and privileged who ended up at the front of the room, while many corps members of color were closer to the back. This eye-opening experience was one of several, another noteworthy experience being a panel of representatives from Dallas Independent School District (ISD) who came to Basic Training Academy to speak to the corps about what goes on in Dallas’ education system.
A Teach for America (TFA) alumna proudly proclaimed to CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard, “I was exposed to DEI and identity work for the first time in my life by being in TFA.”
In Compliance or In Hiding?
Recently, TFA has redirected their previous webpage that says they “build the foundational skills and mindsets of an aspiring anti-racist educator” as a part of their training, and put other DEI material behind a “member only” login to ensure they continue to receive the $50 million they get from government sources.
Other programs pushing DEI through AmeriCorps have freshly scrubbed their websites, or have disguised DEI by calling it unassuming words like “resilience” to fly under the radar of Trump’s executive order, but it doesn’t mean that their three-decade-long pursuit of being a factory for social justice zealots is ending anytime soon. In the wake of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cutting fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal government, it is high time to investigate AmeriCorps, its various branches, and the state programs their funding supports.
State Service Commissions Serve Social Justice
State Service Commissions — which allocate federal AmeriCorps funding they receive to state programs through annual grant competitions and administer special volunteer initiatives that encourage participation — are no better. Mixed in with grants to organizations that offer service projects to volunteers that are actually beneficial for the community are grants to projects that serve progressive agendas.
UServe Utah, the state service commission for Utah that received $15 million in federal funding in 2023, is a good example of how fraud, waste, and abuse are happening through AmeriCorps programs.
UServe Utah gave money to marketing firm Declarative to create the Community Engagement Pathways survey and subsequent toolkits.
Some of the pathway names on UServe Utah’s website have been recently changed to obscure their true intent of creating community organizers and activists. The previous toolkits for each pathway have also been mysteriously erased off the internet, and replaced with a more sanitized version as of January 1, 2025.
What are they hiding?
The previous version of the Social Entrepreneurship & Corporate Social Responsibility Pathway toolkit said it was geared toward preparing service members for “working or influencing businesses in the private sector to adopt ethical business practices, such as environment, social and governance practices” (ESG).
ESG is a reporting tool that operates like a cartel, forcing businesses to collect data on and report metrics that reflect their commitment to leftist political policies in order to look favorable to banks and investors for capital.
UServe Utah is All In on DEI
The “Community Organizing & [Social Justice] Activism” toolkit suggested one of the ways that volunteers could engage with their community in that pathway was “training to become a peer educator in diversity, equity and inclusion.” Similarly, the toolkit for the Direct Service Pathway mentioned “Working with youth at an LGBTQIA resource center” to fulfill that service path through DEI.
Sui Lang L. Panoke, senior vice president of DEI at Zions Bank and creator of the Rethink RACISM program, was hired through UServe Utah to speak as a panel member to educate young professionals, higher education students, and AmeriCorps members who attended their 2023 Active Engagement retreat. Is this what Utah parents and guardians think their children are learning about when they send them to a UServe Utah retreat focused on cultivating skills for volunteerism? More broadly, is this what the American taxpayer envisions their hard-earned money going towards to foster a spirit of service in our nation? Probably not.
A Volunteer-to-Activist Pipeline
On the whole, the AmeriCorps programs and many of its volunteers are being used as boots on the ground for progressive political causes during their service, and also afterward as they are given a leg up to leadership positions in many of left-leaning organizations that are AmeriCorps partners.
AmeriCorps job listings include projects such as: identifying gay-straight alliance groups and their status within area schools to curate a resource database for youth, creating DEI youth training videos for “family planning” centers, developing a training curriculum for professionals and volunteers serving LGBT youth, etc.
Volunteers who are indoctrinated through AmeriCorps’ DEI-laden trainings end up impressing these ideologies onto the youth they mentor as “Student Success Coaches” and are also afforded an easy pipeline to become teachers through this program. For example, a self-described emotional, queer, homeless person named Miguel Johnson was plucked off the streets, trained by City Year for a few weeks, and then was placed into a middle school in Kansas City as a mentor where he encouraged a child to embrace his queer identity. According to the article describing this, he plans to pursue a career in education after his service year.
Scaling of Service Programs Portends Disaster
Funding for the various AmeriCorps programs and how much corps members can earn and how they can serve has been scaled considerably over the last few years. Considering that a recent article calling for Trump to link civilian and military service was co-written by City Year’s founder Alan Khazei, it’s logical to question whether this substitute for a draft could be a scheme to ensure every person will be subjected to corps training that’s designed to create DEI operatives and change agents that call for America’s governing structure to be more in line with socialism and/or communism.
This is not what President Reagan had in mind. If AmeriCorps is allowed to continue unchecked, our nation’s volunteer service program will poison more and more citizens against the real spirit of our country and persist in producing activists that will do everything they can to destroy our culture, our representative democracy, and the individualistic values that truly set America apart. It’s time to investigate AmeriCorps.
Lisa Logan is the host of the YouTube Channel Parent of Patriots and author of the Substack Education Manifesto. As a wife, mother, and patriot, she has made it her mission to expose the sinister agenda behind Social Emotional Learning programs and other initiatives that seek to take away cognitive liberty.
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