It was a graduation ceremony. It was also the first time since April that City Year Philadelphia Executive Director Darryl Bundrige could exhale.

After navigating a $3.75 million federal funding cut and its ensuing uncertainty, City Year Philadelphia’s 77 AmeriCorps volunteers finished out their service year with a graduation ceremony inside the Academy of Natural Science’s auditorium Friday.

Corps members wore classic graduation white under their iconic red City Year bomber jackets, filling the first several rows as staff members commended them for sticking around.

“We didn’t bring you to here to leave you. … Even when the funding wasn’t there, we didn’t leave you,” Bundrige told the crowd while choking up. “And you didn’t leave us.”

City Year volunteers — like all AmeriCorps members — receive a modest living stipend and a higher-education grant in exchange for serving full-time in Philadelphia-area schools as student success coaches, working one-on-one with students to boost attendance and proficiency in core subjects like Math and English.

City Year was one of 11 AmeriCorps programs in Philadelphia that saw funding slashed as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) attempted to gut the national volunteerism agency. DOGE clawed back $400 million in community service grants, laid off staff, and shut down its national disaster response team.

» READ MORE: Philly lost $10.2 million in the latest round of DOGE funding cuts to AmeriCorps

City Year stood to lose the most out of any Philadelphia-area program, according to an Inquirer analysis, until a federal judge ordered President Donald Trump‘s administration to temporarily pause the cuts and reinstate the grants.

The judge’s ruling came after Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, and 23 state attorneys general sued over what they called “immediate and irreparable harms.”

The verdict is cause for celebration, Bundrige said, but not relief. City Year Philadelphia is still waiting to hear whether it received $2.8 million in federal funding for the 2026-2027 academic year. Without it, Bundrige said, the program may need to “change the profile” of what it offers.

“We believe that the injunction is positive, but we’re still waiting to hear about any future funding,” Bundrige said. “So we’re hopeful, but there’s still some unknowns.”

The uncertainty has not stopped some City Year Philadelphia members from building their lives around the program. Over 42% of this year’s graduating class plan to return for another year of service, said a City Year spokesperson, and 70% plan to remain in Philly. Some graduating corps members have plans to get Ph.Ds, Bundrige said, and 30% hope to keep working in education.

Kaiyah Taylor, 24, will be spending a second year with City Year working with sixth graders at the Avery D. Harrington school in West Philadelphia. A West Philly native, the past year has felt like a full-circle moment for her.

“I care for these kids,” Taylor said. “These students grew from low to high [test] scores because they have someone to look up to who looks just like me and talks just like me.”

» READ MORE: AmeriCorps must restore programs in Pa. and other states that sued, judge rules. But DOGE staffing cuts remain.

Navigating the cuts

The theme of Friday’s graduation was as much about resilience as it was about sacrifice. City Year Philadelphia volunteers were able to remain in schools despite DOGE’s cuts, Bundrige explained, because the program was able to draw from other funding sources.

Some local programs were not so lucky: Five West Philadelphia high schools lost college and career coaches in April after DOGE pulled more than $805,000 from the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development. Elsewhere mental health, education, and conservation programs had to cease operations entirely after DOGE cut all the AmeriCorps funding in states such as Kansas and Maine.

The situation, Bundrige told the audience of graduates, reminded him of the the Rev. James Cleveland gospel song “I Don’t Feel Noways Tired.”

“Some of you may be looking at me saying, ‘I am tired’ … [or] that even though no one told you that road would be easy, they didn’t say it would have as many challenges as it had,” Bundrige said. “But you also got through it. … Many students’ lives are better because they’ve come to know that someone cares about them through your service.”

Attendance improved at the Norristown Area High School’s Roosevelt campus after the school received five City Year student success coaches, according to administrator Lindsay Martin. “You could just see our kids’ confidence levels grow because they had someone on their side.”

The Norristown corps members “never let on that anything was happening when they came to work,” Martin said. “It never showed on their faces that [City Year] could’ve ever been in jeopardy.”

» READ MORE: DOGE’s sweeping AmeriCorps cuts leave Philly volunteer programs unsure if they will get promised funding

Friday’s graduation ceremony was an otherwise jubilant affair, with a corps member emcee distriburing awards for leadership, selflessness, and even best-dressed. The event ended with a reminder for volunteers to fill out their time sheets before leaving.

The work, it seemed, is never quite done — at least for Julian Beauregard, a student success coach from Florida who will be returning to Edwin Forrest Elementary School in Holmesburg as a team leader next year. The students, he said, didn’t give him much choice.

“I would get sick, and then the next day I would enter the classroom and get swarmed by, like, 35 different children,” said Beauregard, 22. “All of the students make us want to come back for more.”