This op-ed was originally published by Inc.com on July 3, 2025.
By Noral Segal
My father created AmeriCorps, which has helped build American entrepreneurship. It also built me.
Entrepreneurship is at the heart of what makes this nation great. It’s an engine of opportunity and the driver of our country’s economic strength. It’s also the reason we have an incredibly innovative social impact sector.
As a social entrepreneur, I can trace many of the professional skills I’ve employed over the last 30 years to my time as an AmeriCorps member. AmeriCorps has done the same for hundreds of thousands of others since its founding in 1993 as an independent agency that engages Americans in service through volunteer work programs.
The Trump Administration has proposed to defund AmeriCorps, but Congress holds the power to allocate the funds needed to keep it running, and this month prepares for the annual appropriations process. Defunding the program would be an astonishingly short-sighted move that would undoubtedly weaken our nation’s ability to compete, create, and care for one another in the decades to come.
Let me take a step back. In 1995, when I signed up during the program’s early years, I knew about AmeriCorps because my dad, Eli Segal, was the original architect of the program. He had left behind a successful business career to enter the federal government and help pioneer national service.
Thirty years later, AmeriCorps now has deployed more than one million Americans in service to their country through real work that strengthens our nation under the motto “Getting Things Done.” From its inception, the program has been based on principles of limited government, personal responsibility, and strong communities. It long has been one of the government’s most popular programs, with an impressive return on investment—every federal dollar generates $17 in economic value—and has received deep bipartisan support since its founding.
Back in the early 1990s my father and I talked about the promise of AmeriCorps, and the early debate over what should take priority in the program’s design. Was “Getting Things Done” (delivering immediate outcomes to communities) or civic engagement (building engaged citizens and transforming participants through service) the most important goal?
What I see now, looking back, is that neither can happen without the other. On my first day as an AmeriCorps member for Catholic Charities Refugee and Immigration Services in Somerville, Massachusetts, I was told that a wave of people—Bosnian refugees and Cuban immigrants—would be arriving at the agency soon and would need places to stay. I found realtors who volunteered to help. I worked up the nerve to call the head of a big regional furniture store, who lent us two delivery trucks. My former high school history teacher let me come in to talk to students about immigration and refugee issues, and I closed the class by getting students to dedicate their upcoming weekend to collecting and moving furniture. Twenty volunteers helped source and distribute 250 pieces of furniture, many hundreds of boxes of dishes, appliances, linens, and more.
In the process I not only got things done, but developed lifelong skills: problem-solving, risk-taking, and teamwork chief among them. I developed resilience and creativity, built teams, and managed and coordinated the pieces of a complex project. These are the durable skills of entrepreneurship.
I loved serving my country, helping the most vulnerable among us, and engaging others in the process. I loved working with people of all ages, cultures, education, and socioeconomic backgrounds. I loved showing our newest residents the welcoming spirit of Americans. AmeriCorps gave me a deeply rewarding, life-launching experience, and it generated real results for a community in need.
Since then, over the course of my professional career, I have built and scaled social impact organizations that improve our nation’s public schools and increase educational opportunities for economically disadvantaged children. I have led diverse teams, forged innovative partnerships, and helped solve seemingly intractable problems. Today, I invest in for-profit education entrepreneurs who are similarly committed to meaningful improvement in teaching and learning.
My AmeriCorps experience is far from unique. The program’s history is rich with stories from people across this nation who developed invaluable entrepreneurial skills through their service to others, abilities needed more now than ever before as our country makes its way through an era of massive AI-fostered disruption to our economy.
The administration’s proposal to defund AmeriCorps would shut down an effective entrepreneurial engine—the power that drives so much creativity, innovation and economic value for our nation. Congress has appropriations markups at the end of July. They should fully fund AmeriCorps.
Mora Segal is a Managing Director at A-Street, a fund that invests in education solutions to improve teaching and learning