Overview:

-The Climate Corps aimed to help Michigan reach its goal of economy-wide carbon neutrality by 2050.
-Its work came to a halt when the Trump administration cut nearly $400 million in AmeriCorps grant funding.
-Michigan taps the state General Fund and American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding to continue the work.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between IPR and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

Lucas Roff met his then-girlfriend when he was going to college at Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie. After he graduated with a degree in biology, they got engaged.

“I decided I need to find a job up here,” he said.

Several months ago, he landed at the Inter-Tribal Council of Michigan as an environmental technician through the MI Healthy Climate Corps. His work includes helping tribes tackle grants to reduce pollution and data about greenhouse gas emissions.

For example, he said, “if we’re assisting a tribe on their solid waste here, we would set up a plan to help them make their trash pickup more efficient.”

The Climate Corps aimed to help Michigan reach its goal of economy-wide carbon neutrality by 2050. Until recently, it fell under the umbrella of AmeriCorps, a federal program that offers paid community service jobs. It came to a halt when the Trump administration cut nearly $400 million in grant funding to AmeriCorps in April.

AmeriCorps programs range from veteran support to education to disaster response. The MI Healthy Climate Corps focused on work such as local energy plans, agriculture, and community outreach.

Members received stop work orders at the end of April. In the interim, some organizations tried to find other ways to continue the work of their corps members.

Then, in early June, Michigan said it would pay out stipends to the members who wanted to complete their terms, which last through mid-October. It tapped into the state General Fund and repurposed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding, according to Jeff Johnston, a spokesperson for Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy.

“The good news is that the work that this team had been doing around the state — in nearly 30 communities and organizations throughout the state — is continuing,” Johnston said.

Members received stipends between $30,000 and $35,000 during the program’s first eight-month term.

Johnston said the work includes energy audits, helping to increase “vehicle fleet electrification,” creating environmental education guides and community sustainability plans — “a variety of projects that various communities and organizations statewide wouldn’t otherwise have the resources to tackle, but which provide real, tangible benefits for their people.”

MORE REPORTING FROM PLANET DETROIT

Climate fellow: ‘I’m really glad to be back now’

Mallory Meston, a climate readiness fellow with the Michigan Office of Rural Prosperity, said she works with township supervisors and clerks to figure out their plans for state funding for communities adopting renewable energy.

“I help them kind of brainstorm different projects or ideas that would most fit their community and that their community has interest in,” she said, such as townships renovating their parks, township halls or fire departments. She also works on climate and energy efforts through the Rural Readiness Network.

The stop work order brought all that to a halt.

“No one really knew what was going to happen, and it was kind of just a lot of question marks,” she said. “But I’m really glad to be back now. My teammates at ORP have been great and were able to kind of pick up my projects, and so I’m just finally getting back into everything.”

The nonprofit Community Economic Development Association of Michigan, or CEDAM, manages the Climate Corps program. It had started recruiting hosts for the third cohort of climate corps members in April. But due to the uncertainty of AmeriCorps funding, it says it has paused recruiting for now.

Michigan was among a coalition of states that sued over the AmeriCorps cuts at the end of April. A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore funding to those states’ AmeriCorps programs while denying their request to reinstate AmeriCorps staff placed on administrative leave.

In an email to IPR, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said that AmeriCorps had failed eight consecutive audits and identified more than $45 million in improper payments last year, and that states “can and should fund programs that benefit their local communities.”

AmeriCorps didn’t respond to a request for comment.

With the state’s funding push, Meston and almost all of the other corps members are staying on as fellows. (Since the program is no longer affiliated with AmeriCorps, the state changed its name to the MI Healthy Climate Fellows program.)

Roff, with the Inter-Tribal Council, was hoping to keep working in a different role if the program was cut. So the decision to continue as a climate fellow was easy.

“I really enjoy my job here, and I really enjoy the people that I work with,” he said. “To have this program started again, to have another opportunity to keep working here, I jumped at it.”

Izzy covers climate change for communities in northern Michigan and around the Great Lakes for IPR through a partnership with Grist.org.

Izzy spent five years at KDLG in Dillingham, Alaska, as a reporter and news director. There, she covered local news in Bristol Bay, collaborated with other radio stations across the state and reported for Alaska's Energy Desk. She also led the annual Bristol Bay Fisheries Report, a daily show for the region's communities and thousands of commercial fishermen.