First, thanks to you and your girlfriend for serving! We love Peace Corps Volunteers, especially when we see so many serving as AmeriCorps members when they return home!

The last few years have been difficult for anyone recruiting anyone to serve or work – corporations, nonprofits, military. It’s forcing all of us to pay more attention to outreach and clearly articulate the benefits to serving. At AmeriCorps, the challenges in recent years have accelerated our efforts to raise the living allowance and think deeply about other wrap around benefits like housing, transportation and training. It’s also made us get smarter and sharper on recruitment and advertising. We have our first centralized recruitment team in more than a decade and are doing even more to reach potential members where they are - whether that’s traditional advertising or letting members take over our social media channels and share their stories any chance they get. Regardless, we have been thrilled to see robust interest from Americans of all generations in serving their country, and the great thing about AmeriCorps is we can quickly change with the needs of the community and the interest of those serving. For example, we helped more than 12 million people during the pandemic, and we have more than 15,000 AmeriCorps members working on disaster response and combatting the impacts of climate change.

>Some folks were attributing this to generational differences and eagerness/willingness to volunteer.

The far bigger issues:

Cost of living. So many people just can't afford to volunteer. They can't afford gas,, they can't afford childcare.

Lack of awareness about volunteering. Many organizations, like volunteer fire stations, have not switched out they've been recruiting volunteers for decades.

If you visit the r/volunteer subreddit, you will see young people BEGGING to volunteer.