Since 2006, AmeriCorps Members have served with Impact Alabama’s SaveFirst Initiative, managing sixteen free income tax preparation sites and coordinating the volunteer efforts of more than 450 college students each year. Thanks to the support of AmeriCorps, SaveFirst has grown into the largest and most successful volunteer tax preparation program in the state of Alabama.

SaveFirst: A Tax Preparation and Savings Initiative trains college, graduate, and law students to provide free tax preparation services and opportunities for savings to low-income, working families—especially targeting those eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit. During the 2013 filing season, Impact Alabama AmeriCorps Members working with SaveFirst recruited and trained over 450 college, graduate, and law students from sixteen college campuses across the state of Alabama. AmeriCorps Members and student volunteers prepared tax returns for more than 6,200 working families in Alabama—helping them to claim $11.7 million in refunds and saving them $1.9 million in commercial preparation fees.

SaveFirst targets households eligible for the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a refundable tax credit for low-wage, working individuals and families designed to “make work pay.” Many low-income households are eligible for the EITC and other credits but are unaware of their existence and do not apply for the annual refunds. Moreover, many families lack the resources or knowledge to file their own taxes and rely on costly commercial tax preparers. More than 70% of the 500,000 EITC-eligible families in Alabama pay a commercial tax preparer to complete their taxes. Overall, these families lose more than $100 million each year to tax preparation fees and refund anticipation loan costs. This year, SaveFirst helped more than 6,200 of these families save money and claim important tax credits, providing families with extra money they can use to secure health insurance, pay down debts, or put food on the table.

Volunteer tax preparation sites frequently face problems recruiting qualified volunteers from the general population. However, Impact Alabama’s SaveFirst initiative has shown that large scale free tax preparation programs can be implemented in an extremely cost-effective way by developing a model that capitalizes on the motivation and commitment of a generation of college students towards volunteerism and civic engagement. SaveFirst actively partners with professors from college campuses across the state to offer service-learning courses for students in which they receive academic credit while providing needed service in the community and examining societal structures which create the need for their service.

Impact Alabama AmeriCorps Members coordinate every aspect of the SaveFirst initiative, including developing and distributing marketing materials to target communities, building relationships with community organizations and businesses to increase outreach to more Alabama families, developing training presentations, recruiting and training college student volunteers, and managing tax preparation sites and overseeing the work of college student volunteers at the sites.