Exactly a month today, we here at United Way of King County wrapped up our 11th season of the Free Tax Campaign!
If you don’t know, the Free Tax Campaign is a volunteer program which provides free tax preparation for low-income families and individuals in King County. Along with tax prep, our volunteers also connect people to valuable asset-building services such as helping them apply for public benefits, pulling credit reports, applying for the FAFSA, and a number of additional services.
So how did our 11th season go? We’ll let our numbers do the talking:
17 |
We had 17 sites located throughout King County
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14,900 |
We helped 14,900 families and individuals with tax preparation at our sites. That’s the most we’ve ever done!
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$22,000,000 |
Our work brought back $22 million in tax refunds back to the community!
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$7,700,000 |
A whopping $7.7 million of the refunds came from the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The EITC is one of the largest anti-poverty tools in the United States that helps low-income, working families stay out of poverty. In 2010, nationally, the EITC lifted 5.4 million people out of poverty.
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1,500 |
We helped 1,500 households connect to other asset-building services. This includes helping over 100 households apply for Basic Food (Washington’s food stamp program), pulling credit reports for 241 individuals (which led to the discovery of a number of fraudulent activities!), assisting and referring 132 people on their FAFSA applications, plus much more!
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700 |
This work was done by our 700 amazing volunteers! All of our volunteers trained to become IRS-certified and helped prepare taxes, served as interpreters, led clients through the intake process, and connected clients to asset-building services.
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22,000+ |
In total, our volunteers donated over 22,000 hours of service to the Free Tax Campaign!
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We are thrilled that we were able to make this huge impact in our community! We’re going to be doing even more next year — and if you’d like to be a part of it, you can sign up here to be notified when volunteer registration opens up (in October). If you have any questions about the program, you can send us an email at EITC@uwkc.org.
