There have been 9 Yellow Ribbon events so far this year. Our group has provided volunteers to support each of these events.
These Yellow Ribbon events are very important to the service members. They are either pre- or post-deployment. The event takes place usually in a hotel for the weekend. All the agencies that support the soldiers are present such as: The American Red Cross, Veterans Hospital, American Consumer Credit Counseling, Massachusetts Housing, Tri-Care, Veterans Education Benefits, America Legion, and of course we are proudly represented by our FPA volunteers. There are more agencies present, this is a sample. These events give the service members a chance to visit all the support agencies in one place.
There are scheduled meetings each day where some of the agencies make presentations. Jon Harrington, the Massachusetts Guard’s Personal Financial Counselor, does this for the finances and makes reference to our FPA volunteers who are busy all day answering questions or signing up service members for one-on-one counseling. The number of service-members at these events can go from 200, to one event where we had 800 Marines and family members at the 25th Marine Battalion Yellow Ribbon weekend.
The tax preparation program headed by Jon Harrington and Major McLaughlin was a tremendous success.
We had 11 volunteers dedicate 183 hours to this program.
The members were:
- Deb Antel
- Larry Cohen
- Hal Estabrook
- Erica Feldblum
- Judith Henry
- Steve Hibbard
- Brendan Lammers
- Alan Melanson
- Beth Rogers
- Jennifer Simes
- David Welch
All of the volunteers were recognized and those who could attend were presented awards at a barbeque hosted by Jon and Major McLaughlin at the Natick VFW on May 22nd. The awards and recognition were from Territory Manager of the Internal Revenue Service and L. Scott Rice, Major General and Adjutant General of the Massachusetts National Guard.
Jon announced at the BBQ that the tax prep program completed 1563 Federal and State tax returns, saved service-members and their families $239,000 in tax preparation fees, and generated over 2.1 million Federal and State refunds for service-members. In addition, our volunteers helped counsel 260 service-members and families.
Hal passed out FPA certificates of appreciation to all the volunteers who participated in Yellow Ribbon events and who are doing one-on-one counseling with service-members and who were there when we needed them. They included the above tax prep volunteers and in addition the following:
- Charlie Curtis
- Kenneth Der
- Michael Hourigan
- Christopher Petrik
- Dick Power
- Brendan Sheehan
David Welch received special recognition for his tax prep work and financial counseling with the service-members. David received the Commander’s Award for Public Service. The award was signed by Major General Rice.
During this tax prep time, a nice thing happened between our Military Pro Bono program and Rick Fingerman’s Dana Farber group. Rick told me he had a cancer patient who was quite distressed over her taxes, didn’t have much in the way of resources and could we help? I contacted Jon Harrington who immediately agreed to assist the patient. She went to Guard headquarters in Wellesley and Jon took care of filing her taxes.
At the tax prep sessions, one of the questions asked on the intake sheet was whether service-members wanted to be contacted by a financial advisor. This list along with service-members who signed up for help at recent Yellow Ribbon events amounted to over 150 names to be contacted.
If you have any questions about our program or think you might be interested in working with the service-members and their families, please contact me – Hal Estabrook hestabrook@aol.com
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