Sacramento nonprofits report millions of dollars lost due to Trump funding cuts
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Nonprofits lost millions as Trump administration rescinded grants in Sacramento.
- AmeriCorps cuts crippled key social services, displacing vital staff and mentors.
- Leaders seek support from foundations to sustain programs amid growing demand.
Rachel Rios thought she’d pulled off a miracle. La Familia Counseling Center had just saved the jobs of its AmeriCorps members in late April after the Trump administration abruptly announced that the program was being shut down.
These members were the backbone of La Familia’s parenting classes, diaper distributions and other support services for low-income families in south Sacramento. They were students counting on their stipends to survive.
“We were celebrating that we saved them all, that we were able to keep them all till the end of the fiscal year,” said Rios, the nonprofit’s executive director.
Then a week later, another blow landed. She learned that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was terminating an $18.6 million grant for a new community hub and park in south Sacramento.
La Familia’s experience encapsulates the chaos, confusion and damage rippling through Sacramento’s nonprofit sector as community-based organizations grapple with an unprecedented wave of contract reversals, rescinded funds and targeted cuts by the GOP Administration — all coming with little notice and no recourse.
“We were getting ready to build. We were getting ready to dig the ground,” said Rios, whose team had finalized architectural drawings, gotten permits from the city and lined up contractors.
Rios joined four other nonprofit leaders on stage at a town hall Tuesday, sharing startling details about how the loss of federal funds and targeted policies have affected their organizations.
Federal funding losses radically affect service delivery
Like La Familia, the Mutual Assistance Network, Folsom Cordova Community Partnership, River Oak Family Resource Center, Sacramento Children’s Home and WellSpace Health utilize dozens of AmeriCorps students provided through a grant administered by the Child Abuse Prevention Center.
Lawrence said Mutual Assistance lost half its staff when federal funding for 10 AmeriCorps students was terminated. They were crucial to the organization’s mission to work with low-income families in neighborhoods like Del Paso Heights and Arden Arcade to establish bonds that will help them overcome the academic, health and financial traps that so often ensnare people in poverty.
While a number of nonprofits have sued in federal court to recover the promised funding, local leaders said that, out of an abundance of caution, they are operating as though it’s not coming.
“I’ve never known Birth & Beyond without AmeriCorps,” she said, referring to the network of family resource centers that serve thousands across Sacramento County. “We had to figure it out. … The pivot has been real.”
The Mutual Assistance team still had to meet the same grant conditions and community needs — parent coaching, crisis intervention, even helping families get to medical appointments — while addressing surging demand for these services. Other panelists said their organizations also were seeing an increase in people seeking help.
“We are helping families that we’ve never helped before just with food,” Lawrence said. “We’re helping families that we’ve never helped before, just with transportation to get to their doctor’s appointments and so on.”
The real heartbreak, she said, is watching families disappear from public life out of fear — especially immigrants in households. Even documented immigrants are unwilling to seek services if Mutual Assistance can’t guarantee safety, Lawrence said. She and her team have had to come up with ways to ensure their clients won’t be targeted.
Abrupt AmeriCorps shutdown left $5M hole at one nonprofit
Few nonprofits in the Sacramento region have been hit harder by the shutdown of AmeriCorps than Improve Your Tomorrow.
The nonprofit — which mentors more than 3,000 young men of color in Sacramento alone — lost $5 million in funding, a quarter of its annual budget, Casper said. A day after the event, Casper said he learned that IYT is now positioned to receive about a half a million dollars in AmeriCorps funding for the current fiscal year in Nevada and Maryland, but it cannot as yet get the funding for California. That includes $1.5 million blow in Sacramento.
Nationwide, IYT has several hundred college-enrolled men tutoring boys of color at the high school and junior high level and helping them find a pathway to higher education.
“Our mentors reflect the students that we serve,” Casper said, so oftentimes (they are) first-generation students, oftentimes people who are struggling to pay for college.”
When IYT mentors lost AmeriCorps, Casper said, they not only lost wages, averaging about $30,000 in Sacramento, but also loan deferments, food assistance and education awards that will amount to roughly $8,000 for full-time members in the fiscal year ending in September.
Losing even a portion of these benefits could result in students withdrawing from college, Casper said, so the IYT leadership team has been working to mitigate that possibility. Like Mutual Assistance, the organization secured grants based on their ability to achieve measurable results.
“We’ve been, over the last couple of months, thinking creatively on how do we make up that gap to ensure the brothers that are in need of the support, the exposure, the accountability, the love that we provide on a day-to-day basis (are) not impacted because we no longer fall in alignment with the administration’s policy,” Casper said. “We’ve got a ‘by any means necessary’ approach and mindset because we know the work is too important to become weary.”
Casper said he was encouraged by just commiserating and brainstorming with other nonprofit veterans and by seeing that charitable foundations were represented in the room and also engaged in finding solutions.
Nonprofit veterans witnessing an assault on the soul
Coté, the leader of the Gender Health Center, said the losses aren’t just financial. They’re spiritual and emotional.
“Trans people have been targeted extensively with this new regime in a way that traverses the soul,” Coté said. “It’s a psychological; it’s a spiritual; it’s an emotional assault.”
Coté’s organization provides counseling, case management, and medical navigation to people who are often turned away elsewhere.
Their small staff of 11 — all trans Black, Indigenous or other people of color — deal with many of the same fears about their safety and repression of their rights as their clients. Yet every day, they work to keep up with mounting requests from people whose health insurance has lapsed or whose providers now refuse to treat them.
Coté said people ask questions such as, “Will I be able to go to a provider and receive the care that I need on my journey?” or “What does this mean for my kid? What does this mean for our schools?’‘
LGBT Center staff watches as allies make concessions
David Heitstuman, CEO of the Sacramento LGBT Community Center, echoed those fears. His team, too, lost a federal grant, learning it had been terminated seven days after the decision had already taken effect.
And, corporate support has plummeted by is 30%, he said.
“It’s a weird space to be in,” Heitstuman said. “We worked really hard to diversify all of our funding streams, and every single one of them — from individual donors going down to all the different state funding and local funding — is paralyzed by fear and worried.”
Meanwhile, his staff and clients face rising anxiety, despite California’s more progressive policies. His organization found in a recent survey that about 70% of respondents felt less safe being out at work or school than they did just a few years ago.
This is “in California, where we have incredible protections and a pretty affirming sort of day to day space,” Heitstuman emphasized. “To see that people are feeling like they need to go back into the closet and hide their identity just to go about their everyday life in an environment where they enjoy the most protected legal space is really, really disheartening and challenging.”
However, Heitstuman said he refuses to dilute the LGBT center’s identity just to chase safer funding.
While he and others on his team have watched allies scrub their websites of LGBTQ language and support for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, Heitstuman said he won’t be doing that at his organization.
“We’ve been filing (IRS Form) 990s for the last 45 years,” he said.” I’ve been on thousands of TV interviews and social media posts. If they’re coming for us, if they’re going to come and round us up, they know where to find us.”
Nonprofit leaders discuss holding the line, together
At the town hall, hosted by Sacramento Building Healthy Communities and Everyday Impact Consulting, facilitators asked attendees to offer up ideas on ways that funders could assist nonprofits in the region. The ideas will be shared with philanthropic organizations and other types of funders.
Despite the federal funding losses, the five panelists spoke with a gritty determination to adapt, seek out like-minded organizations to collaborate and keep showing up for those who depend on them.
“We have to do this together,” said Lawrence, urging government agencies and philanthropic organizations to continue to move toward a true continuum of care that provides a range of healthcare services and ensures seamless transitions between different levels of care as needs evolve.
Rios asked foundations to support more capacity-building investment so that nonprofits aren’t scrambling from crisis to crisis. Nonprofits saved the day during the COVID-19 pandemic, she said, and the partnerships with local government agencies, health care systems and foundations will be key to continuing the work in Sacramento neighborhoods as federal funding disappears.
Heitstuman said he’s “just trying to figure out ways that we can at least be in closer communication and understanding of what’s going on, sharing as much information as we have and partnering as much as we can to figure out how to continue to serve the community.”
Casper added a final plea to grantors, partners and funders, asking them to extend some grace as nonprofits find their footing amid a loss of federal investment.
While their missions have not changed, the nonprofit leaders stressed, how their services are delivered will have to change as a result of the federal funding cuts.
