I’ve been advocating for a national service corps with a focus on the environment since at least July, 2007, when I published an editorial on BuildingGreen.com, “An Environmental Service Corps for America.” Since then, I’ve recast the idea somewhat, framing it as a Resilient America Service Corps in this blog on the RDI website from March, 2015.

With the COVID-19 pandemic ballooning the unemployment ranks by tens of millions in America, is it time to take this idea seriously?

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was created to put unemployed Americans to work during the Great Depression. It operated from 1933 until 1942 and employed a total of 3 million people during this period of time—a maximum of 300,000 at any one time.

America needs something like that today to provide employment for some of the tens of millions of workers who have lost  their jobs since the outbreak of the pandemic.

Structuring a Resilient America Service Corps:

• Like the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, a Resilient America Service Corp would be targeted toward young women and men graduating from high school or college and wanting to do something to better the country and the world.
• As envisioned, this service corps would be voluntary, but it could be incentivized by an offer of free college tuition, or forgiveness of college loans, upon completing two years’ of service. Eventually, it could become one of several national service options available to young adults—military service being another.
• A national office of the Resilient America Service Corps would maintain an inventory of programs around the country that need labor support. States, municipalities, non-profit organizations, schools, and others could apply to this national office to obtain needed labor.
• Projects the Resilient America Service Corps could undertake would be varied to meet their interests and skills and the needs that are most pressing (see below).

Resilient America Service Corps programs

Here are some examples of projects that could be undertaken by the Resilient America Service Corps. Several of these I described in more detail in my March 2015 RDI blog.

• Deep energy retrofits for affordable housing. One of the biggest challenges in reducing our nation’s carbon emissions will be improving the energy performance of existing homes and apartments. These improvements will likely have to go beyond simple weatherization to include retrofit insulation and window upgrades—and doing this will take considerable labor, both skilled and unskilled.
• Ecological restoration of coastal wetlands. Wetland ecosystems protect coastal development from storm surge during storms. To function well, these wetlands need to be restored in many areas—planting native vegetation, removing non-native species, controlling erosion to allow healthy vegetation to get established, etc.
• Invasive species control. With increasingly global trade, invasive plants and animals have landed in places where there aren’t native controls—and become invasive. Control of invasive plants often involves significant on-the-ground labor.
• Assisted migration of forest ecosystems. As the planet warms, the dominant species in some forests will be weakened and die off. If the warming were very gradual, more southern species would naturally migrate northward and take over these ecosystems. But with very rapid warming—as we’re experiencing—natural migration of ecosystems may not be able to keep up, allowing opportunistic invasive species to take over. Humans may need to intervene, planting more southern (but still native) species to speed up these ecosystem transitions.
• Elevating landscapes and building protective berms. While elevating roadways and other elements of our landscapes would take a very special work force, backed up by heavy equipment, such work will need to be done on a widespread basis and will require many forms of labor, including a sizeable workforce.
• Creating and staffing Resilience Hubs. The Resilient America Service Corps could help to build and then staff community resilience hubs in cities, towns, and neighborhoods throughout the country. These could be community facilities—usually piggybacked onto other community centers—that serve as cooling centers for residents without air conditioning, that provide power for charging cell phones and laptops during power outages, that offer high-speed WiFi 24/7 even during power outages when most cable modems and routers don’t work, that provide secure access to potable water, that distribute food and other critical supplies during emergencies, and that provide information resources for dealing with natural disasters and other crises.
• Supporting community gardens. The Resilient America Service Corps could provide labor to help with community gardens. Young, fit volunteers could set up irrigation water, deliver manure and mulch straw, and help with soil preparation using walk-behind tractors.
• Helping with pedestrian pathways. A program of the Resilient America Service Corps could provide communities with mapping and permitting support for creating pedestrian and bicycle pathways, and volunteers with the Corps could help create and maintain those pathways.
• Creating community gathering places. As a complement to to community resilience hubs, volunteers with the Corps could build shade structures and plant shade trees to create outdoor gathering places.
• Building rain gardens. Rain gardens can capture and infiltrate rainwater, keeping it from contributing to flooding during storms—which will be particularly important with more intense storms and flash flooding with climate change. Resilient America Service Corps volunteers could design, permit, build, plant, and maintain these facilities.
• Building and distributing rainwater harvesting systems. Volunteers with the Corps could provide rainwater harvesting systems that capture precipitation and enable it to be used for watering gardens and landscapes. Simple rain-barrel systems could be sourced from manufacturing companies and delivered and set up by the Corps for homeowners and renters—and for community gardens.
• Setting up and operating composting and recycling facilities. Proper separation of waste, including organic material can be labor-intensive, and the Resilient America Service Corps could provide labor to make these facilities successful. Staffed facilities can also make re-use of goods more feasible.

National service in the age of pandemics

As we have seen with COVID-19, pandemics create short-term food shortages, while spurring interest in home gardens—numerous of the above-mentioned programs become more important during pandemics. In addition, other programs of a national service corps could be specific to virus outbreaks and pandemics:

• Testing and vaccinating. A team trained in medical support could administer COVID-19 tests and vaccines. Once the COVID-19 pandemic is behind us, this program could morph into other vaccinations and medical testing.
• Producing and distributing personal protection equipment (PPE). With the shortages of PPE during COVID-19, many community efforts sprang up to sew cloth facemasks and even fabricate face shields. A Resilient America Service Corps could facilitate such efforts throughout the country if and when that need next emerges.
• Contact tracing. A team trained in contact tracing could help to stop the spread of this virus—and others that may emerge in the future.

Building the case for a Resilient America Service Corps

Now is the time to advance the idea of a national service corps. With unemployment so high, we need creative solutions to put America back to work. Let’s do that in a way that also helps to increase our resilience.

It is also a time for big-picture thinking. We are approaching national elections and thinking about what this country needs, bring up the idea of national service—and a Resilient America Service Corps—with politicians; this should be part of the discussion.

Share your ideas. How can we bring this idea to fruition?

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Along with founding the Resilient Design Institute in 2012, Alex is founder of BuildingGreen, Inc. To keep up with his latest articles and musings, you can sign up for his Twitter feed. To receive e-mail notices of new blogs, sign up at the top of the page.