Live United

This past January in Fremont, the mayor, members of the city council, and others gathered at Fremont Family Resource Center to celebrate National Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) Awareness Day.  During the event, Fremont Family Resource Center was also presented with a $10,000 check by Citi to support their EITC work.

According to recent reports, as many as 100,000 Californians fail to file for the EITC leaving as much as 1 billion in unclaimed refunds. This is why our Earn It! Keep It! Save It! coalition partners are so important.

With about a month to go before the April 15 deadline we thought we would check in and find out exactly how the VITA sites are able to do what they do. We asked Carolyn Robertson, Program Coordinator of the Fremont Family Resource Center’s Family Economic Success Program (via email), to tell us more about what they and their volunteers are able to accomplish every year and it’s pretty amazing.

United Way: How many volunteers do you have?
Carolyn Robertson: 76 returning Volunteers, and 69 new volunteers

United Way: How many languages do you offer?
Carolyn: 22 languages, which includes American Sign Language

United Way: How many tax returns are you hoping to do this tax season?
Carolyn: 1,600 returns

United Way: Do you do anything special with or for clients while they are waiting to be seen by tax preparers?
Carolyn: We offer a number of extra services including:

• Food stamp eligibility screening

• Pre-paid debit card enrollment

• Informing customers about other services/programs offered by the Family Economic Success Program and the Fremont Family Resource Center

• And offering access to banking institutions:  Citibank, Fremont Bank, and US Bank.  Bank representatives also serve as VITA screeners and/or translators

United Way: What other services do you connect your tax clients to? How?
Carolyn: The screener & tax preparer interview process provides an opportunity to get a sense of the customer’s situation. In the course of the conversation, or based on the customer answers to the questions on the in-take sheet, we determine if we are able to offer the customer resources in the area of children’s health insurance, financial education, financial counseling/coaching, AC CAN (Alameda County Community Asset Network) banking tool, unemployment services, food stamp & Medi-Cal benefits, family counseling/case management, legal services, or housing services.

United Way: What is the secret to your success?

Carolyn: Keeping our volunteers happy by…

• Helping volunteers to succeed in their volunteer roles, providing in-house training for all volunteer positions, providing opportunities for new volunteers to shadow returning volunteers; providing volunteers with constructive feedback; and also allowing volunteers to provide feedback as well

• Keeping volunteers informed of our successes/challenges via email and verbal communication; distributing quality alerts to keep everyone abreast of new rules/procedures, etc.

• Providing immediate access to site coordinator and/or VITA coaches (expert VITA volunteers) to answer questions or to provide guidance

• Having cheat sheets to help with various procedures

• Allowing our volunteers to grow professionally and personally:

• volunteers are able to learn from one another and transition to other volunteer positions, i.e. greeter to tax preparer, translator to screener, or tax preparer to VITA coach

• volunteers are offered an opportunity to learn new skills

• Incorporate a recognition event at the end of the tax season
• Feed the volunteers!!!

Thank you Fremont Family Resource Center for your help filing the almost 50,000 tax  returns we expect this year. They are just one of the many great partners who together with volunteers are making a real difference across the Bay Area.