Air Quality

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 member is a person who does 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 providing training in civic bridgebuilding skills and techniques to AmeriCorps members;
Benefit AmeriCorps Members:
• Provide benefits to AmeriCorps members aimed at enhancing member experience and bolstering member recruitment and retention such as paying more than the minimum living allowance, transportation, housing, food, etc.; Create workforce pathways for AmeriCorps members, including deliberate training, certifications, and hiring preferences or support;
• Enhance and expand services to second chance youth and/or engage those youth as AmeriCorps members;
• Develop and train the next generation of diverse public health leaders through service while addressing pressing community health challenges. Review Public Health AmeriCorps Priority in the Mandatory Supplemental Information for eligibility information;
Use Evidence
• Utilize reports from the AmeriCorps Evidence Exchange on programs assessed as having Moderate or Strong evidence to scale, replicate, or adapt the intervention;
Faith-Based
• Organizations that are faith-based; and
American Climate Corps
• Please note that applicants may propose projects to be affiliated with the American Climate Corps (ACC), which is a federal government national service and workforce development initiative focused on training young people for the clean energy and climate resilience workforce. Applicants who are interested must demonstrate that their project funds ACC eligible positions meeting the following criteria:
o The position has verifiable climate or environmental impact.
o The position is temporary (term-limited), and the term length is at least 300 hours.
o The position includes skills-based training as part of the program and provides a pathway to employment.
o The position must receive a living allowance and, in some cases, may receive additional member benefits.

Applicants submitting a workforce development project to qualify for affiliation with the ACC should note that in their application. Successful applicants will be notified if they are part of the ACC and may be subject to additional reporting requirements.

To receive priority consideration, applicants must show the priority area is a significant part of the program focus and intended outcomes. Priority consideration does not guarantee funding.

Hispanic Access Foundation is committed to working in partnership to increase equitable access to urban tree canopy while stimulating community engagement and decision-making in local urban forestry and ultimately heightening our resilience to and mitigating climate change.

Through funding from the Inflation Reduction Act (Funding Opportunity #: USDA-FS-2023-UCF-IRA-01) the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) is making historic investments in boosting the nation’s tree cover in urban, suburban and rural communities nationwide. We are honored to partner with the USFS to become a national pass-through partner for the “Nuestros Bosques IRA Initiative” promoting Justice40, Ten-Year Urban Forestry Action Plan, State Forest Action Plans, congressional, and America the Beautiful priorities. In alignment with the Forest Service and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), 80 percent of the funding will flow directly to disadvantaged communities.

Urban canopy provides enormous benefits, from reducing the urban heat island effect and lowering energy bills, to absorbing carbon dioxide and pollutants, resulting in shortening hospital stays, decreasing asthma rates in surrounding neighborhoods, and lowering stress, noise, and damage from wind and water. Planting trees along streets and in parks to increase the urban tree canopy can remove millions of tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere, helping to improve our climate.