Please click the link below and read our description of how two credit unions, the UW Credit Union in Wisconsin and SECU in North Carolina, have set up free and low-cost tax preparation services. https://filene.org/publications/download/taxprep

Written by Stacy Forster of UW Communications

Classes are done for the day at Emerson Elementary School, but a few parents — with their children in tow — head back into the building.

Clutching manila envelopes filled with W-2s, 1040s and other tax forms, they enter into the bright fluorescent light that spills from the rooms in the 1920s-era school on Madison’s east side.

From the The Employee Ownership Update
Corey Rosen
February 1, 2010

With the passing of John Logue, Executive Director of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center and a board of advisor member of Progress Through Business, there is now a huge hole in the economic development world.

John had just started working with us, as well, on the new Alliance Holdings SES Advisors Legacy Fund. It was a pleasure to be with him whenever we could.
And we miss him already.

Our best go out to John's family. And we look forward to picking up a small part of the work that John was not able to complete.

3/31/2009 (edited)

By David Morrison, Credit Union Times

A research report from the Filene Research Institute proposed that credit unions should consider offering tax preparation services for more than just low income members or lower income communities.

Instead, John Hoffmire and Thomas Harms argue in The Economics of Serving Low‑Income Employees at Tax Time: Implications for Credit Unions that credit unions should consider using the workplace to offer tax preparation services not just to their own lower income employees but low income employees of Select Employee Groups as well.

By TAMAR LEWIN, NY Times
Published: February 21, 2009

Created in 1992 to simplify applying for financial aid, it has become so intimidating — with more than 100 questions — that critics say it scares off the very families most in need, preventing some teenagers from going to college.

Then, too, some families have begun paying for professional help with the form, known as the Fafsa,a situation that experts say indicates just how far awry the whole process has gone.

By JOHN MARKOFF
Palo Alto, Calif.

STEVE WOZNIAK built the original Apple I to share with his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, but it was his business partner Steve Jobs who had the insight that there might be a market for such a contraption. Indeed, for decades, Silicon Valley has been defined by the tension between the technologist’s urge to share information and the industrialist’s incentive to profit.

Now a new style of “hybrid” technology organization is emerging that is trying to define a path between the nonprofit world and traditional for-profit ventures.