I was 13 years old when I caused the accidental death of a friend.
That’s the kind of sentence that stops people in their tracks and it should. I remember the silence that followed, not just from the world around me, but inside me. How do you move forward from something like that when you’re still just a kid yourself? I didn’t know how. No one did. I just kept waking up inside a body that felt like a prison and a world that no longer had a place for me.
There was no guidebook for a child who had taken a life, even by accident. No healing circle. No support group. Just isolation, shame, and eventually, prison. I wore my guilt like skin. And no matter where I went, school, the streets, a cell, I never felt like I belonged. Not to a community. Not to the future. Not even to myself.
That’s why AmeriCorps Public Allies didn’t just change my life. It saved it.
I didn’t come into the program confident or put together. I came in broken. But Public Allies didn’t ask me to hide that. They didn’t shame me. They didn’t treat me like a case file. They treated me like a human being with potential, not just a past.
They gave me meaningful work and trusted me to lead. They handed me a mic when I thought I’d never have a voice. They sat with my story when others ran from it. Through service, I found healing. Through community, I found purpose. And for the first time in years, I felt something crack open: I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live.
Not survive. Live.
AmeriCorps didn’t save a version of me. It saved me. All of me.
Now, the government wants to shut it down. To some, that’s just a budget cut. To me, it feels like an attack on everything I’ve fought to become — on everyone like me who is out there right now, quietly losing hope. Waiting for someone to see them.
Because here’s the truth: not everyone has the same starting line. Some of us start with a tragedy that follows us like a shadow. Some of us grow up in systems that forget us until we fail. Some of us have never once been told, “You still matter.”
That’s what Public Allies did. It said, You still matter.
If you’ve never hated yourself so much that breathing felt like punishment, you may not understand what programs like this really do. They don’t just build résumés. They build lives. They don’t just reduce unemployment. They reduce despair.
Don’t let AmeriCorps die.
Because if you do, you’re not just cutting a line item. You’re cutting off lifelines. You’re killing the one place where someone like me can walk in with nothing but a story and walk out with a reason to keep going. I am one of the lucky ones. And I’m writing this because I know there’s someone else out there, on the edge, waiting to be seen.
Don’t let us disappear.
Yancy Singleton lives in Norwalk.