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Tax forms are filled out by trained volunteers.

As the year draws to a close, many people in Northern California are anticipating tax season. One organization is getting ready to prepare thousands of tax returns for free.

Each year, United Way of the Wine Country offers free tax assistance service via a program called Earn It, Keep It, Save It.

“Too many families in Sonoma, Mendocino, Lake, Humboldt, Del Norte areas, they're really struggling to make ends meet. We know that even with two-parent households where both have full-time jobs, that's the reality,” said United Way’s Suzanne Harris. “Lately, we've seen the loss of SNAP moneys, rents are always going up, they're not meeting with inflation. So really the tax refund and tax time has never been more crucial as a mechanism to actually support a family.”

Harris says this free tax assistance is the local version of a federally funded service called the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program.

It is intended to help low-to-moderate income families and individuals making less than $80-thousand dollars per household.

“We have helped thousands of families and just topped overall $110 million in refunds that we've brought back into the community,” said Harris. “We do know that with every dollar that is brought back to these families, it basically goes out into the community about eight times.”

United Way is looking for volunteers now to help as tax preparers, intake coordinators, and interpreters.

“We offer free IRS certification and advanced tax law in the last two Saturdays of January and the 1st Saturday in February,” Harris said. “We will IRS train you and certify you so that you can then volunteer at one of the organizations between February and April to help people prepare their taxes.”

Harris says volunteers are not actually filing the taxes but rather helping to ask the right questions and fill out the correct forms.

Each volunteer double checks the work, and then a site coordinator looks at it a third time. She says in the 13 years that she has worked on this program, it has grown to serve marginalized communities.

“When I started we were maybe serving about 2-percent of the Latino community or those who also identify as limited English proficient. And so now we're about 55-percent of our clients are from the Latino community and they have really trusted our program,” said Harris. “Many of them sometimes come from countries where you might not trust this kind of financial situation or banks, and we have gained their trust over the years.”

Learn more at unitedwaywinecountry.org