Meet Your Volunteer Tax Site

Extreme Makeover- Oakland Edition

Last week, employee teams from Abbott Labs, Rockwell Automation, and Barclay Capital performed an extreme makeover, which will benefit hundreds of Oakland families. The “SparkPoint Spruce-Up” event was one of our many corporate volunteer events that United Way organizes throughout the year. (We currently have a backpack drive underway.)

Over the course of three days, volunteers prepped, painted, installed furniture, and completely revitalized the Family Resource Center located at the Lion Creek Crossings housing development, which is also home to our SparkPoint Oakland Center. The Resource Center works closely with SparkPoint to serve the families that live in the housing complex, as well as other neighborhood families.

The Resource Center is a great place for families year-round because it offers a number of services, including after-school activities, a computer lab, homework help, as well as summer camp. These complement SparkPoint’s offerings, which help families improve their finances, find jobs, manage their debt, and enroll in higher education programs.

It was a lot of work, but the volunteers were in really good spirits, and were able to complete the rather big job in just three days. We’d like to extend a huge thanks to the all volunteers that helped out, and especially to Abbott Labs, which also provided some additional funding so we could purchase supplies for the makeover.

If you’d like to get involved through a volunteer activity for your company or group, let us know. You can leave a comment, or contact Aditi Aggarwal, aaggarwal@uwba.org, 415.808.4407.

(all photos by Ed Oh)

Meet Your Volunteer Tax Site

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.