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Benefit Bank: Cincinnati parishes help working poor close the income gap
[Episcopal News Service] Four years ago, the Rev. David Bailey preached a sermon to the people of St. Stephen's in Mt. Healthy, an inner-ring suburb of Cincinnati. "I know," he said, "that God is calling us to a ministry in this community that is bold, holy and audacious. All we have to do it figure out what that is."Parishioner Lois Tuttle, a retired bank employee, buttonholed him after church with the answer. "I think," she said, "God is calling us to fill out forms for people."
Now parishioners spend hours every week doing exactly that, confident that by April 15 they will have helped struggling neighbors put thousands of additional dollars into their budgets.
These Cincinnati Episcopalians were among the first Ohioans to use the Benefit Bank: free web-based software created by Philadelphia-based Solutions for Progress through an initiative of the National Council of Churches. The software helps eligible people apply for tax credits and benefits that are a key part of Congress' 1997 welfare reform.
Food stamps, child-care vouchers and Medicaid becoming are increasingly valuable as more jobs pay less than a living wage and do not provide health insurance.
According to the Ohio United Way, for a parent earning $7.98 an hour in 2006, day care costs at prevailing market rate for two preschoolers would consume 76 percent of her or his pre-tax income.
Launched in Ohio in 2006, the Benefit Bank is a godsend in a state where growing poverty threatens to swamp the food pantries and other traditional emergency assistance ministries that have been the core of most church outreach.
The Diocese of Southern Ohio's Episcopal Community Services Foundation (ECSF) was the first organization to recruit Ohio sites for the Benefit Bank. Sharing a grant from the Jessie Ball DuPont Fund, ECSF asked the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks (OASHF) to partner in recruiting and training churches and community-based organizations to add tax and benefits outreach.
Intimidating forms
Ohio's public benefits application forms are multipage, and applicants must furnish many other supporting documents to prove rent, income and identity. ECSF grantee churches report that this deters many apparently eligible people from applying. Based on state population and income statistics, the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services estimated in December that as many as 596,856 Ohioans who appear to be eligible are not receiving food stamps.
The Governor's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives estimates that Ohioans annually fail to claim more than $1.3 billion dollars for which they are eligible -- most of this in federal dollars. The Earned Income Tax Credit alone can add as much as $4,716 to a working parent's budget. Food stamps and child-care vouchers each can add several hundred more dollars a month.
The combined value could raise a family's purchasing power more than $10,000 a year. With Internet access, a computer, a printer and volunteer effort, some of the diocese's tiniest congregations are helping boost families out of poverty.
These programs also infuse new federal dollars into blighted local economies. The USDA estimates that each dollar of food stamps generates about $1.80 in economic activity. Enrolling families in Medicaid improves family health status through more timely care, reduces the cost of lost work time to employers and lessens the burden of uncompensated care on local hospitals and clinics.
Tax-and-benefits outreach can be frustrating. Benefit Bank counselors report discouragement when potential beneficiaries miss appointments. The typical intake session can take 90 minutes or more. Benefit Bank sites are competing with the seduction of INSTANT CASH trumpeted by ubiquitous ads for storefront tax firms.
Counselors struggle to persuade people that it's worth waiting for a refund in order to avoid the tax-prep fees and interest charged on a refund anticipatory loan. These costs can consume hundreds of dollars that otherwise would go into a family's budget.
First fruits
But determined Episcopal volunteers are starting to see the fruits of their labor. In the first two weeks of tax season, the St. Stephen's team helped more tax clients than in all of last year, including several returning clients.
Success stories are adding up, like that of a Cincinnati mother who used her IRS check to pay thousands of dollars in fines imposed by a landlord after she broke the lease to move her lead-poisoned infant to a safer apartment. With the money left over, she bought a second car and gave the first to her son, a plumber's assistant, so they no longer must rise at 5 a.m. to get to day care and two jobs.
The project also has increased the collaboration of Episcopal churches with the state's safety net, from state and county government to other service providers. The DuPont grant to ECSF helped provide matching funds for a new VISTA team, which OASHF sent to each of its regional food banks to engage its member agencies in offering this new service. The project partners have organized productive discussions with state and county government to find ways to reduce the bureaucratic hurdles that deter people from applying for food stamps or Medicaid.
Last spring, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland adopted the Benefit Bank as a key element of his strategy to revitalize the Ohio economy. The testimony of Episcopal Benefit Bank counselors helped win a new Ohio Benefit Bank line item in the state budget to expand training, outreach, site support and software updates. In January, the Ohio Second Harvest VISTA team was named one of the nation's 10 most effective VISTA anti-poverty programs.
To learn more about the Benefit Bank, other states where it isavailable or the implementation strategy developed in Ohio, visit the Benefit Bank at www.thebenefitbank.com or contact Ariel Miller at ecsf@eos.net.