By admin 
California Volunteers, the agency within Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office that oversees AmeriCorps and other volunteer programs, failed to properly supervise seven organizations that received federal grants. One organization mishandled $11 million, according to a watchdog report, which recommended that the federal government claw back some of the money.
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AmeriCorps’ Office of the Inspector General audited $54 million in AmeriCorps grants from January 2022 to April 2024 awarded to seven contractor organizations via California Volunteers, which is housed within the Governor’s Office of Service and Community Engagement.
The federal watchdog found that California Volunteers lacked adequate internal controls or oversight, making it difficult to tell what organizations did with their grants and creating “significant risk” that federal funds would “be misused, wasted or subject to fraud without detection.”
In one case, California Volunteers delayed giving federal auditors records pertaining to three grant awards for six months. One of the recipients, a Sacramento nonprofit, couldn’t provide receipts, invoices or timesheets to accounting for its spending, nor did its records match its federal financial reports, providing only an Excel sheet to justify a $312,294.98 single invoice.
That organization, CivicWell, failed to maintain records showing how it managed its grants, leading the AmeriCorps OIG to question $4.8 million in federal costs and another $6 million in reported matching costs. Another organization, Bay Area Community Resources, violated grant rules by charging higher hotel rates than the federal per-diem limit.
The OIG gave 17 recommendations, including one that AmeriCorps recoup the $4.8 million and require California Volunteers to overhaul its internal monitoring practices, train staff, and require contractors to correct their expenses, payroll and other records.
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California Volunteers spokesperson Cristina Valdivia said the agency acknowledged the Sept. 30 audit report and was addressing the procedural issues. The agency planned to work with AmeriCorps to resolve some of the OIG’s 17 recommendations, while taking issue with the OIG’s characterization of the CivicWell costs, she said.
“(The agency) disagrees with the $10,844,122 in questioned costs, which stem from reconciliation challenges with a former subrecipient rather than unallowable expenses,” Valdivia said in an email.
Newsom, First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom and Chief Service Officer Josh Fryday — who oversees GO-SERVE — appeared Wednesday at a ceremony welcoming 10,000 new California Volunteers for its 2026-2027 cohort. Neither Newsom nor Fryday took questions from media and Newsom’s office directed a request for comment to California Volunteers.
California Volunteers is the largest state volunteer corps with 50,000 members since 2019, the year Newsom established the program. In addition to overseeing flagship projects like the California Climate Action Corps and College Corps, California Volunteers oversees some of Newsom’s more ambitious ventures, like his mandate to combat male loneliness.
California Volunteers disagreed with the watchdog’s recommendation to suspend CivicWell, noting that the organization stopped receiving grant funds in July 2024.
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