One-stop Prosperity Centers for taxpayers
September, 2006
In 2000, United Way of Palm Beach County assembled community leaders for an assessment of the community. They found that many residents in Palm Beach County struggle to meet their basic needs of food and shelter. With the information from this assessment, United Way developed its five-year strategic plan which included a strategy to bring community partners together to address the pressing needs in their community. Thus, the United Way of Palm Beach County Prosperity Campaign was born.
The vision of the Prosperity Campaign is to empower low-income and low-wealth residents of Palm Beach County to secure adequate income, accumulate savings, and live in economically viable neighborhoods. The Campaign links individuals to family and economic support systems that promote long-term self-sufficiency.
This approach encourages individuals and families to develop plans (called Prosperity Paths) which include specific, timely goals and objectives that provide the knowledge, processes, and resources that increase their potential for sustained personal/family economic growth.
VITA volunteers helped prepare taxes for Palm Beach County residents who earned less than $38,000 a year.
The first phase of the Prosperity Campaign was to expand the existing Palm Beach County Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program. Motivated by IRS data that showed the county had $11,500,000 in unclaimed EITC and 18,000 eligible households not filing for the EITC, United Way opened 18 additional VITA sites, to complement the existing 10 sites operated by the Community Action Program. For tax year 2002, the existing Palm Beach County VITA Program completed 641 returns. The next year, under UWPBC leadership for the first time, 4,035 returns were completed and $6.8 million in refunds returned to working families. For tax year 2005 just completed, at 41 sites, 8,166 families received $14 million in refunds, of which $6 million was in EITC refunds.
Providing free tax preparation was just the first step. 46% of the Palm Beach County population earns less that $40,000 per year. From the start, UWPBC knew that working families need additional economic supports, such as career counseling, job-skills training, and credit counseling, to give them the skills and tools needed to increase their potential for economic growth and sufficiency. Once taxpayers had their refunds in hand, UWPBC wanted them to leverage that money. Knowing that existing services were fragmented, UWPBC implemented phase two of the Prosperity Campaign by opening three Prosperity Centers in October 2004. In the fall of 2006, two additional Prosperity Centers will be opened.
These Prosperity Centers are one-stop neighborhood resource centers, each located in specifically-targeted communities that have high concentrations of low-income residents (the Pleasant City section of West Palm Beach, Riviera Beach, Belle Glade, Pahokee, and Delray Beach). These Centers are not the typical one-stop facility.
Rather than just being facilities housing a mixture of loosely organized community providers, Prosperity Centers are a coherent collaborative effort among service providers. Through grant funding, United Way contracts with various organizations, which provide full-time dedicated staff to the Campaign. As a result, United Way manages the entire network of service providers. At the Centers, clients can:
- access economic supports (EITC, food stamps, KidCare, Medicare/Medicaid, etc.)
- gain a working knowledge of money management, debt management, credit repair and financial literacy
- access family crisis support counseling
- create a plan to grow personal assets (home ownership, savings, etc.)
- set career and educational goals to improve earnings potential
- access the Individual Development Account (IDA) Program.
These supports, all offered under one roof, are provided through contracts with the premier service providers in the county, including:
The Prosperity Campaign also offers the Individual Development Account (IDA) Program at the Prosperity Centers. The IDA Program is a matched savings program, designed to give low-income working families the skills to manage their money and save for the future. The client saves $2,000, and UWPBC will match it with an additional $4,000 to be used for down payment assistance on a new home, or to start up a small business. Prosperity Centers work closely with local community development corporations (CDCs) to help clients layer additional subsidy programs for down payment assistance. One of the objectives of the Prosperity Campaign is to integrate the VITA Program with the IDA Program. To date, 35 VITA clients have used their tax refund to enroll in the IDA home buying program.
According to Carter Elliott, Director of the Prosperity Campaign, lack of affordable housing is the number one problem that Prosperity Campaign clients face. He sees no problem getting taxpayers into the IDA Program, but the clients have a problem locating a home that is affordable. With IDA guidelines based on federal poverty guidelines, a single person has to earn $19,600 or less to be eligible. It is very difficult for a person at this income level to purchase a home in Palm Beach County, where the median income is $62,000, and median home price is $395,000. UWPBC is working with several local community development corporations and Community Land Trusts that are addressing the problem of affordable housing.
Carter learned a lesson this tax season about staffing. The VITA program started with a full-time Program Manager, who retired after the 2004 tax year. For the 2005 tax year, UWPBC experimented with a seasonal VITA Program Manager (September - May). By May, they realized a full-time Program Manager was needed to work on promoting the EITC, and recruiting volunteers year round. They hired Siriwan Miller, who brings her experience as one of their volunteer tax preparers since their first season, as the new full-time VITA Program Manager.
Tax preparers for the VITA program speak the three major languages of the region - English, Spanish, and Creole. For less common languages, they work closely with a translation service. They have tax preparers who are deaf, can read lips, and use American Sign Language.
During the 2004 tax season, United Way of Palm Beach County was one of eight organizations across the country that participated in a survey to determine the correlation between income levels and medical debt. The results, tabulated and published by The Access Project in Boston, indicate that there is a high correlation between income levels and medical debt. Low-income and low-wealth individuals tend to have high medical debt, and as a result, poor credit. This medical debt, in turn, provides a barrier for low-income individuals to sustain economic growth. United Way is working closely with its partner, Consumer Credit Counseling Services, Inc., to determine the ability to have medical providers (such as hospitals and doctors) to write-off medical debt from Prosperity Campaign clients’ credit reports.
During the 2005 tax season, United Way of Palm Beach County was one of four organizations nationally to participate in survey, sponsored by the National Disability Institute and the Ford Foundation. The project, called TaxFacts+, is a financial education campaign that seeks to increase knowledge and utilization of tax benefits in order to improve the economic security of individuals with disabilities. As a result of the TaxFacts+ survey, plans are underway on a national level to explore opportunities to provide support to this segment of the population. Locally, United Way has begun educating the disability population about utilizing tax incentives and existing resources in order to help gain economic stability.
UWPBC uses the 2-1-1 phone service extensively. All VITA materials read, ”To find your nearest VITA site, call 2-1-1.” The phone center generates daily reports on the number of calls, and operators are fluent in the three major languages. 2-1-1 provides information on site locations, directions on how to get to sites, hours the sites are open, accessibility information, and languages spoken at each site. UWPBC typically sees a marked spike in the number of 2-1-1 calls after advertising on radio or TV, which is an indicator of the effectiveness of that marketing.
Marketing is done through multiple channels:
- 150,000 flyers printed in English, Spanish and Creole distributed throughout Palm Beach County, including all Title One public schools.
- TV and radio PSA’s in three languages (English, Spanish, Creole).
- Weekly press releases issued from December through April, which generate local news stories.
- United Way representatives interviewed on diverse radio shows.
- United Way representatives interviewed on local TV news shows.
- Full-page newspaper advertisements.
- United Way and IRS representatives speak as a team to neighborhood associations, non-profit groups and corporations.
Volunteers were initially recruited through a web site. UWPBC’s Volunteer Center promotes the volunteer opportunities. Siriwan has already contacted last year’s volunteers, and finds that 90 volunteers plan to come back for another season, a remarkable testament to the program. She attributes this to volunteers being aware of the difficulties that low-income families face, to the face-to-face interaction with clients while preparing their taxes, and to the obvious appreciation of clients for their tax refunds. Trust is built up between clients and tax preparers, with some clients asking for the volunteer who prepared their taxes the year before.
Siriwan tells the story about a young woman who appeared at a VITA site, as Siriwan was getting into her car after closing the facility for the evening. She told the client to come back tomorrow, but the woman insisted she had to do it that night, because she was being deployed to Iraq the next day. Needless to say, Siriwan re-opened the building and completed her return. The following tax filing season, a young man came in with the same family name. Siriwan asked him about his relationship to the young woman. It turned out he was the woman’s husband, having just returned from Iraq.
While word of mouth is the best means of promotion, VITA volunteers are recruited from:
UWPBC has contracted with the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development to evaluate the economic impact of the entire Prosperity Campaign on Palm Beach County. This evaluation, which will also provide feedback on how well the program is performing relative to anticipated outcomes, will provide UWPBC with evaluation data that will serve to make a strong case for sustainable support on the part of current and potential partners.
Current Prosperity Campaign funders include:
Carter and Siriwan work very closely with the Internal Revenue Service, and are focused on integrating the services of the Prosperity Campaign. They want every taxpayer to walk away from a VITA site with information on the Prosperity Campaign, in hopes that these clients will visit one of the five year-round Prosperity Centers, to access programs that promote long-term self-sufficiency.
Story by Don Wedd
