Why this exists

A program director is at her kitchen table at 9:40 on a Tuesday night, comparing a stack of member timesheets against a payroll report, trying to figure out whether a discrepancy she found is a typo or a finding.

She is not underqualified. She is under-resourced, and she is holding a federally funded program together with a level of care nobody outside her office will ever see. What she needs isn’t a training webinar three weeks from Thursday. She needs an answer, tonight, from someone who has read the regulation.

That’s the whole idea here.

What you’ll find

For now, a few pieces each week, on a rotation through the subjects that generate findings:

• Member Timesheets — Time and attendance documentation that survives a monitoring visit: what has to be on the record, who signs it, when corrections are allowed, and how hour categories get counted.
• Member Files — Eligibility documentation, criminal history checks, enrollment and exit paperwork, and the retention rules that decide how long all of it has to stay put.
• Progress Reporting — Writing progress reports that hold up: narrative that matches the data, performance measure results you can trace, and the discipline of reporting what happened.
• Financial Reporting — Federal Financial Reports, match and cost share documentation, drawdowns, allowable costs, and reconciling what you reported to what your books say.
• Performance Measurement — Building measures you can defend — instruments, data collection, documentation of results, and the difference between an output and an outcome.
• Subgrantee Monitoring — Risk assessment, monitoring plans, site visits, timesheet and member file reviews, findings, and corrective action — the pass-through entity's whole job.
• OIG Findings — What the AmeriCorps Office of Inspector General has flagged in recent audits, and what it means for how you run your program on Monday morning.
• 2 CFR 200 Basics — The Uniform Guidance, translated.

Every regulatory claim is cited so you can go read the source yourself. Where we're aware that practice varies by grant or by commission, the article says so instead of pretending there’s one right answer.

How the writing gets checked

Every article is checked against primary sources — the eCFR, AmeriCorps regulations and terms and conditions, OIG reports, and official guidance — and reviewed by both a human and multiple AI tools before it’s published. Anything that can’t be traced to a source either gets a citation or gets cut.

Hey, I’m Gary.

I’m the founder and CEO of America Learns, and the author here. I’ve worked with AmeriCorps programs and state service commissions for more than two decades, helping organizations strengthen the systems they use to manage members, grants, reporting, compliance, and impact.

Over those years we’ve gathered a lot of research and paid a lot of very smart people to help us understand the regulations that govern AmeriCorps. This site is where that research lives, in plain language, for anyone who needs it.

America Learns publishes this resource and we’re glad to say so. But you won’t find product pitches in the articles. If something we build is ever relevant to you, you’ll find it on your own terms — not in the middle of an answer you came here for.

What this isn’t

It isn’t legal advice, accounting advice, or an audit opinion. We're obviously not your grants officer, nor are we the AmeriCorps Office of Monitoring or OIG. The Uniform Guidance gets revised, AmeriCorps grant terms and conditions change every year, different auditors have differing points of view, and your commission may impose requirements stricter than the federal floor.

My suggestion: Read an article. Then read the regulation the article points to. Then check your own terms and conditions. In that order.

And if you have time, let us know if any of this is helpful!