Action Alert: House Proposes a $1 Million Slash to MSA's Funding

Hi there! Lindsay here with an important message from MSA.

We need your help! We're so thankful we have been able to support so many incredible service programs and thousands of members serving in Massachusetts over the past 33 years. We heavily rely on state funding to fund our Commonwealth Corps service program and leverage nearly $28 million in federal funds for our AmeriCorps programs.

Last Wednesday, the Massachusetts House Committee on Ways and Means released its recommendations for the state's FY2025 budget. This includes a proposed $1,000,000 reduction in state funds for MSA from FY2024. This reduction from $2.2 million to $1.2 million in state funding is significant, and, if passed, will inhibit our ability to provide support, funding, and training to our grantees and partners, including our dozens of AmeriCorps and Commonwealth Corps programs.

In addition to supporting service programs, in the past year alone, our state funds enabled us to provide critical support to nonprofits still struggling to rebuild their volunteer programs after the pandemic through our COVID-19 resiliency grants, bolstered our intensive capacity-building work with nonprofits through our Service Enterprise Initiative, and added to our ability to support youth development through a new Career Pathways grant initiative.

We're thankful that our strong partner Representative William Driscoll has filed an amendment (fun fact: Rep. Driscoll is an AmeriCorps Alum!). I'm writing today to ask you to please contact your State Representative by phone or email by next Wednesday, April 24 and urge them to co-sponsor Amendment #881 to H4600 to raise MSA's line in the state budget back to $2.2 million, our FY2024 funding level. You can do this by:

• Finding your legislators and their contact info using Find My Legislator.
• Using or revising this email template to ask them to co-sponsor the amendment and advocate for MSA when speaking with House leadership.

With your help, we're confident this amendment will pass — and that we'll be able to continue our work of supporting organizations doing critical community work for the next fiscal year and beyond.

Send any questions about the budget or outreach to your legislators directly to me, Lindsay Rooney, at lrooney@mass-service.org, and thank you in advance for your support!