Aug 29

2016 Nonprofit Salary Survey report released

By charitableadvisors Feature, Leadership

By Bryan Orander, president, Charitable Advisors

Next week is Labor Day when the focus is on jobs.

As the U.S. recovers from the recession of the previous decade, the labor market has tightened. Amid whispers that the country is moving towards statistically full employment, many employers are reverting to a basic method of recruiting and retaining workers: higher pay. The positions are out there, and employers are upping the ante to get people to fill them.

Citing statistics from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s wage tracker, Bloomberg reported that as of May, the median U.S. worker enjoyed a 3.5 percent wage increase from the same period last year. The figure is the highest year-over-year number since 2009.

How is this playing out in the local nonprofit sector? We have some insights.

Every other year since 2010, Charitable Advisors has recruited sponsorship from local businesses to assemble and publish the nonprofit salary survey report.

More than 240 area nonprofits participated in this year’s survey in April. The survey solicits compensation and benefits information for 20 common nonprofit positions and then segments the information based on organizational size – by either annual budget or number of staff.

In 2016, sponsorship support was provided by VonLehman CPA, First Person Benefit Advisors, The National Bank of Indianapolis and Financial Technologies and Management. There is a link to download the 2016 report at the end of this article.

What can we learn from the salary survey?

I have three quick insights that may resonate with readers, based on my daily conversations with nonprofit leaders and an initial review of this latest salary survey:

Average salary increases appear constant around 3 percent: Since we climbed out of the 2007-2009 recession, the Charitable Advisors’ salary surveys have shown the most common average salary increases for Central Indiana nonprofits continue in the 3 percent range.

Food for thought: How has your organization adjusted its compensation since the recession? Are you able to increase raises in addition to keeping up with rising health insurance costs? Do staff members appreciate the value of their total compensation package?

Harder to hire: For the first time this year, we asked survey respondents whether they were having problems filling staff positions. More than 60 percent of respondents noted difficulty in hiring one or more roles. The most common frustrations were finding personnel for direct service/program positions, licensed therapists and fund development staff. Anecdotally, all are roles that are increasing in the sector to meet client needs or grow resources to meet client needs.

Food for thought: What positions are you finding difficult to recruit? What adjustments are you making to attract and retain staff in key roles? Will a 3 percent average increase keep you competitive in the nonprofit marketplace? Is it competitive in the overall Central Indiana marketplace?

People issues now in top three: Over the past few years, people issues have moved from a “Top 10” issue to a “Top 3” issue with almost every nonprofit we encounter. I see organizations putting increased focus and investing resources on staff and volunteer recruiting, retention, training and development, first-line supervisory training, developing positive cultures and being great places to work.

Food for thought: What adjustments are you making to create a positive work environment? How are you equipping your supervisors and managers to engage and motivate staff? How is the growth in millennial staff and retirement of boomers changing the way you work? How are you preparing for the upcoming retirement of boomers in their late 50s and 60s?

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Recommendations from the field

How many times have you picked up a report with good intentions? You’ll study it tomorrow or review its lessons at a later time. Here are some suggestions from local leaders about the ways they have utilized past Salary Survey data.

As a budgeting tool

Jennifer Tiplick, the Humane Society of Indianapolis chief financial officer, will use it as a tool for next year’s budgets.
Beth Gehlahusen, Meals on Wheels of Hamilton County executive director, said it is the best way to see where her organization falls in the market.

“It is helpful to our board of directors to see the ‘big picture’ and then to be able to relate it to our organization. The release time is very helpful for 2017 budgeting.”

As a board tool

Laura Dodds, executive director, TechPoint Foundation for Youth, said her board wants to compare her salary with others of like sizes.

“I just had my annual review and the board would like to know if my salary is comparable to organizations of my size in this area.”

As a human resources tool

Lori Clyne, the human resources director at Families First, seeks multiple sources of salary information for comparison, noting Guidestar.org and their national association as helpful. “It’s more relevant data than what I’ve found from other sources.”

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Watch for additional insights as we continue to learn from the survey data.

Thanks to our sponsors, you can download the 2016 Nonprofit Salary Survey Report at no charge here.

You will be asked to answer a couple questions to help us understand how the report is being reviewed and used by your organization and by individuals.

Aug 15

New overtime rules: Got compliance?

By charitableadvisors Sponsor Insight

By Jeremy York, Human Resources field representative, Synergy PEO Services

Last year, the Department of Labor (DOL) announced proposed changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the law that outlines overtime exemptions for workers.

These proposed changes will extend overtime protections to nearly five million workers by making many positions previously considered overtime exempt under the Act, nonexempt and eligible for overtime.

After 10 months of review, the final rule was published in May.

Overview

The final rule focuses on updating the salary and compensation levels needed for executive, administrative and professional workers in order to be exempt.

Specifically, the rule:

Changes the standard salary level from $455 per week or $23,660 annually to $913 per week or $47,476 annually; meaning that employees must make at minimum the standard salary level to be classified as exempt.
Sets the total annual compensation requirement for highly compensated employees (HCE) subject to the duties test to $134,004.
Establishes a mechanism to automatically update the salary and compensation levels every three years to align with cost of living etc.
Amends the salary basis test to allow employers to use nondiscretionary bonuses and incentive payments (including commissions) to satisfy up to 10 percent of the new standard salary level.

Employers have until this Dec. 1 to comply with the final rule. This means that in order to be exempt from overtime, employees must make a minimum salary of $47,476 and satisfy the duties test outlined by the DOL for exemption from overtime (see table below). Employees who do not meet these criteria must be classified as nonexempt and paid overtime for any hours worked over 40 hours per week.

Basic requirements for claiming an exemption under the standard duties test

	Executive	Administrative	Professional
Salary Basis Test	· Employee must be paid a salary, not hourly	· Employee must be paid a salary, not hourly	· Employee must be paid a salary, not hourly
Standard Salary Level Test	· $913 per week ($47,476 per year for a full-year worker)	· $913 per week ($47,476 per year for a full-year worker) · Special salary level for certain academic administrative personnel	· $913 per week ($47,476 per year for a full-year worker) · Salary level test does not apply to doctors, lawyers or teachers
Standard Duties Test	· The employee’s “primary duty” must be managing the enterprise, or managing a customarily recognized department or subdivision of the enterprise and managing two fulltime employees, · Additional requirements provided in Section 29 CFR 541 Subpart B	· The employee’s “primary duty” must include the exercise of discretion and independent judgment with respect to matters of significance. · Additional requirements provided in Section 29 CFR 541 Subpart	· The employee’s “primary duty” must be to primarily perform work that either requires advanced knowledge in a field of science or learning or that requires invention, imagination, originality or talent in a recognized field of artistic or creative endeavor. · Additional requirements provided in Section 29 CFR 541 Subpart D

Special note for nonprofits

Nonprofit organizations have been identified as a sector that is most significantly impacted by these changes given their limited budgets and other financial factors.

The DOL recognized this and published a special overview and guidance for nonprofit organizations outlining how the FLSA applies to nonprofits:

Enterprise coverage: All employees of an organization will be covered by the FLSA and overtime regulations, if the entity has annual revenues of at least $500,000, measured by volume of sales made or business done (See the guidance document for more detail.).
Individual coverage: If the employer does not meet the standard for “enterprise coverage,” an individual employee will be covered by the FLSA if he or she engages in interstate commerce or in the production of goods and services for interstate commerce. This can include such regular activities like making out-of-state phone calls, receiving and sending mail or email, ordering goods from out-of-state suppliers (such as Amazon) and handling credit card transactions.

While some nonprofits may not be covered under the FLSA, it is likely that many employees of nonprofits are entitled to FLSA protections.

The DOL’s guidance document also outlines several options for nonprofits on how to address these changes. These options include:

Raise salaries: For workers whose salaries are near the new salary standard and meet the duties test, the organization can raise their salaries to meet the new standard and maintain the employees’ exempt status.
Pay overtime above a salary: Pay newly overtime-eligible employees a salary and pay overtime for hours in excess of 40 per week. The law does not require that newly overtime-eligible workers be converted to hourly pay status only from exempt to nonexempt.
Evaluate and realign employee workload: Limit overtime by ensuring workloads are distributed to minimize overtime and that staffing levels are appropriate for the workload.
Adjust employees’ base pay and pay overtime: Adjust the amount of an employee’s earnings to reallocate it between regular rate of pay and overtime compensation. This method works for employees who work a relatively small amount of predictable overtime. Example: Assume a fundraising supervisor at a nonprofit who satisfies the duties test for the executive exemption earns $37,000 per year ($711.54 per week). The supervisor regularly works 45 hours per week. The employer may choose to instead pay the employee an hourly rate of $15 and pay time and a half for the five overtime hours worked each week, keeping their annual compensation liability for this employee at $37,000 annually.

Compliance

To meet the Dec. 1 compliance deadline, organizations will need to craft a compliance strategy and review internal practices.

Currently, Synergy is working with its clients to:

Conduct FLSA audits to identify which positions are impacted by the final rule.
Develop actions plans for how to implement the new changes.
Identify methods to reduce overtime for those roles that were previously exempt from it.
Understand how these changes may impact company culture and employee morale.

Navigating through these changes can be challenging and even overwhelming. Therefore, it is recommended that you secure an HR partner that can assist in working through these changes. Utilize the right expertise to keep you compliant and to avoid legal action.

Jeremy York, SPHR, SHRM-SCP, is a Human Resources Field Representative for Synergy PEO Services. He provides strategic and generalist HR support to local nonprofit organization leaders and their staffs. York has over 15 years of human resources experience working as a consultant, director of human resources, and generalist, in the insurance, healthcare, nonprofit, PEO, and other industries.

Aug 08

Path out of poverty for small-scale farmers

By charitableadvisors Feature, Trends

By Sathya Raghu V. Mokkapati, CEO, Kheyti

Ashok Goud is small farmer in the state of Telangana in southern India who has been farming two acres of land for the past 20 years. When his paddy crop failed last year due to drought, he planted maize. When the market for maize fell, he learned how to grow tomatoes with help from the local seed store’s owner. When his land was unusable six months in a year due to heat waves exceeding 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 Celsius), he ran a small store on the side to support his family. Ashok is an entrepreneur, and his dedication to an often unforgiving profession is unwavering.

More than a billion people in the world are employed in agriculture, and in India, one out of four people are farmers or agricultural workers. Like Ashok, these smallholder farmers — who constitute 85 percent of farmers globally — make up one of the largest constituencies among the world’s poor. They farm on a hectare or two of land, and often lack access to the right seeds and fertilizers, technology, and knowledge, which in turn makes their yields far lower than they could be. Markets fail them when they try to sell their produce. On top of these challenges, they are increasingly affected by climate change.

Despite all of this, smallholder farmers like Ashok manage to persevere. This perseverance is important for the livelihood of individual farmers and the millions who collectively rely on smallholder farmers for food security.

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Aug 08

Signs of hope in the American food system

By charitableadvisors Trends

By Michael Pollan, author, reprinted from The Washington Post

In the 10 years since I wrote “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” many things about the American food system have changed for the better, but perhaps the most important development — and potentially the most challenging to the long-term survival of that system — is the fact that the question at the heart of my book has moved to the heart of our culture.

I hasten to add this is not my doing. When I wrote the book, Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” and Marion Nestle’s “Food Politics” had already helped pique the curiosity of Americans about the system that fed them. Yet, in general, all writers can really do is lift a sensitive finger to the cultural breeze and sense a coming change in the weather; very seldom do they actually change it themselves. (Or as one of my mentors once explained, “Journalists are at best short-term visionaries. Any more than that, no one would read them.”)

In fact, during the four years I spent researching the book, most of the time I felt like I was late to the story. Something about the public’s attitude toward food and farming was already shifting underfoot, and I became convinced my book was going to be dated on arrival. Food safety scandals, such as mad cow disease in England and outbreaks of E. coli contamination in fast food hamburgers in America, had raised disturbing questions about how we were producing meat. At the same time, climbing rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes had led many to wonder if perhaps Americans had developed a national eating disorder of some kind. Food, which is supposed to sustain us and give us pleasure, was making people anxious and sick. Why?

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Aug 08

The final rule for nonprofit organizations

By charitableadvisors Sponsor Insight

By Mike Staton , co-founder and managing director, Alerding CPA Group

The U.S. Department of Labor (“DOL”) has issued the new overtime final regulations (“Final Rule”) which impact nonprofits as well as for profits. The new rules will go into effect December 1, and will mean that most employees earning less than $47,476 will be entitled to overtime compensation regardless of their employment classification. Neither the Federal Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) nor the DOL’s regulations provide an exemption from overtime requirements for nonprofits. However, there are special rules that apply to nonprofits which is where the confusion and details of compliance begin.

Here are some key points and how they apply to nonprofits:

Effective Date: December 1, 2016 with no phase in period allowed.
Salary threshold: The Final Rule raises the standard minimum level for salaried, exempt workers to $47,476 per full-time year from the previous threshold of $23,660. White-collar employees must also meet the exemption requirements of the duties tests defined by the FLSA.
Enterprise rules: As a general matter, nonprofit organizations are NOT covered enterprises unless they meet the threshold test. The FLSA and the Final Rule apply to enterprises with annual sales or business of at least $500,000. For a nonprofit, enterprise coverage applies only to the activities performed for a business purpose (such as operating a gift shop). It does not apply to the organization’s charitable activities that are not in substantial competition with other businesses. Income from contributions, membership fees, many dues, and donations (cash or non-cash) used for charitable activities are not counted toward the $500,000 threshold.
Individual rules: There are also tests to be made at the individual level. Organizations should review the FLSA guidelines on these rules.

Employers will need to pursue one of several options to comply with these changes. The options include increasing exempt employees’ salaries to the new level, converting them to hourly employees and paying overtime, or one of many other options.

The DOL has published “Guidance for Non-Profit Organizations on Paying Overtime under the Fair Labor Standards Act” for further clarification. You may also contact your Alerding CPA Group professional at 317-569-4181 or visit our website:www.alerdingcpagroup.com.

Michael A. Staton, CPA
Managing Director
Mike is a Certified Public Accountant and is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Alerding CPA Group. Mike has served closely-held businesses for over 30 years and was named the Accounting Advocate of the Year by the U.S. Small Business Administration in 2001.
See Michael Staton’s Full Bio ►

Aug 01

LISC: bridging the skills gap

By charitableadvisors Feature, Programming

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors

Over time, Centers for Working Families has learned that with the right tools, families can take small, deliberate steps that change their financial footing from unstable to solid. But families also need access to higher quality jobs, higher wages, better benefits, steady employment and opportunities for advancement.

To acquire those jobs, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) realized that there were basic skills gaps that must be filled and plans to use a federal grant to do just that.

“We just got a smaller Social Innovation Fund grant to support an adult education program to bridge the skills gap,” said Tom Orr, senior program officer at LISC.

In January, the Social Innovation Fund (SIF), part of the Federal Corporation for National and Community Service, awarded funding to three Indianapolis Centers for Working Families — John Boner Neighborhood Center, Mary Rigg Neighborhood Center and Edna Martin Christian Center. A fourth center, Southeast Community Services Center, receives private funding.

Overseen by LISC, the SIF grant funds Bridges to Career Opportunities, which teaches core skills such as math, reading and English as a Second Language in combination with “soft skills” like interviewing, teamwork and conflict resolution. The coursework is organized by specific industries’ or sectors’ employment needs in order to prepare participants to succeed in subsequent technical-skills training. In the next 12 months, the goal is for nearly 200 people to receive these services.

This local effort is part of an $11.3 million SIF grant to the national LISC office, which developed the Bridges to Career Opportunities program and began piloting it last year. The goal is to “prepare low-wage workers for careers in local growth sectors.”

Aug 01

Program helps families become financially savvy

By charitableadvisors Feature, Programming

By Lynn Sygiel, editor, Charitable Advisors

Ten years ago, Terri Ottinger was laid off, raising two elementary-aged daughters alone and trying to save the family home from foreclosure. Ottinger and the girls’ father had split, and more than anything, she wanted to keep the house they had owned together to give her children a stable lifestyle.

Not knowing how she could ensure that, she saw a flier for the Family Success program and applied to take part. A decade ago, that program, located at the Hawthorne Center on Indianapolis’ Westside, changed her life. What the program taught about budgeting and credit has stuck with her.

It helped her stabilize her finances, and since then, she has purchased a different home on her own, gotten a job with Wayne Township schools, started a savings account and paid her bills on time while boosting her credit score to over 700.

Today, the Hawthorne Community Center is one of eight Centers for Working Families in Indianapolis. Started with an Annie E. Casey Foundation grant in 2004, and originally called Family Success, the center was housed at Washington Community High School.

Indianapolis was a logical pilot site for the Family Success program, an outgrowth of the Casey Foundation’s Making Connections project. That work was already happening locally through a collaboration with Community Solutions Inc., a local community development consulting firm. Lena Hackett, CSI’s president and founder, said the Baltimore-based foundation’s research showed a strong link to fragile families being successful if they could optimize all of their revenue streams and have access to quality financial coaching.

Today, there are 80 centers in more than 30 cities around the country managed by the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), one of the largest organizations supporting projects that revitalize communities. A recent independent study by the Economic Mobility Corporation found that Center for Working Families participants have greater success meeting their financial goals.

The key to their positive outcomes? The centers do more than simply offer employment assistance. Locally, to meet the needs in neighborhoods, more focus has been put on credit and budgeting. In addition, United Way is now a funding partner.

Tom Orr, senior program officer at LISC, has overseen the work in Indianapolis, and started with Hackett at CSI. He said the costs per center are $150,000 to $175,000 annually.

“We always say it’s not just another program, just a new way of organizing services for low-wealth or low-income families. It’s a bundle of services that consists of financial coaching, employment and career coaching and income supports broadly defined. Oftentimes it can mean the difference between stability and living on the street,” said Orr. He said it helps people get steady, living-wage employment, boosts their credit ratings and increases net income and net worth.

There are three main services bundled together: one-on-one financial counseling, employment assistance and help accessing public benefits that supplement work income. Clients are coached over the long term. LISC believes that no single strategy combats all the complex and deeply rooted factors of poverty, and holds true for individuals struggling to balance a household budget.

In January, United Way took the lead on financial sustainability for LISC’s model. LISC had had the benefit of significant federal funding for many years, but that is no longer available. Local funders also played key roles.

“We had local funders who really got it, the Clowes Fund, the Indianapolis Foundation and Pulliam Trust. Without their help, I don’t know that we could have done this,” Orr said.

To ensure ongoing support, Orr said he learned it was important to clearly communication to funders that this change doesn’t happen overnight.

“One lesson we learned is that this work takes a long time. The anecdotes that we share through the network are that this work takes two, three, four or five years for families really to make significant progress. And it’s not a straight line. Oftentimes, it’s just one step forward and one step back,” said Orr.

LISC provides opportunities for the eight centers’ staffs to network. All three coaching strands – employment, financial and supports – have roundtables to share information, peer exchange and in-service training. With the exception of the financial coaches who meet monthly, each group meets every other month. Site managers meet quarterly.

Over time, the process for a nonprofit to become a Center for Working Families has evolved and gotten more rigorous. It includes a pitch to stakeholders who help determine its inclusion. The newest organization to offer services is PACE, a nonprofit that “provides a variety of services to help offenders, ex-offenders and their families to lead productive and responsible lives in their community.”

According to Rhiannon Edwards, the executive director, the initial conversation was in 2009, when LISC was looking for an Eastside partner.

“At that time, we felt like, ‘We’re not really ready for that. We’re still trying to navigate what services our clients need to really be successful.’ So even though we’ve been doing this for a long time, we really looked at our data. We don’t just want to have an employment program, we wanted to figure out exactly what makes our population successful,” said Edwards. “We’ve realized as we’ve grown, we were delivering all the services that are being delivered in the Center for Working Families sites, other than the financial coaching.”

Once PACE decided there was potential, the first step was to apply for a planning grant to determine how the program could work with its existing services. Initially staff members worried that serving all of their clients might be impossible. Annually, PACE has 1,500 new clients.

“We were saying, ‘We’re a little nervous because our world is very different from the other organizations’ world.’ We want to make sure we’re not making a mistake trying to do this,” said Edwards. With the help of a consultant, the nonprofit created a logic model to serve as a road map for staff.

“People come to us in so many different times in their life, they’re not all ready to go down the Center for Working Families track. We deliver the same service that we delivered before we got this designation, we just have a process that decides when we enter them into the Center for Working Families database,” said Edwards.

Key to the program’s success, Orr said, is hiring skilled financial coaches. These are people who have the ability to work one-on-one with families on their finances and help with budgeting, credit repair and debt management.

“Credit is just a big deal. We’ve learned a lot about it over the years. It affects everything. People with bad credit pay more for everything. It affects their employment, it affects their housing prospects. There are just lots of ramifications to having bad credit. Moving credit scores is still a slow business. It might take a couple years or more,” said Orr.

Four years ago, LISC’s Chicago office developed a model called the twin-account program as a credit-building tool. A client applies for a $300 loan at a credit union that is a locked account. Monthly the client makes a $25 payment until the loan is paid off. The payments are reported to the three credit bureaus.

“At the end of the term, if they’ve paid all their payments on time, we’ll match. They then have $600 that they can use to invest in crediting building or pay down their debt. We have been fairly flexible in how they use it, we don’t want them to blow it, but we encourage them to use it so they can invest in a secure credit card or pay down debt or put it in a savings account. The coach works with them to make that decision,” said Orr. “If a person understands or can see that they’re making that kind of progress even if it’s modest, just moving from the 500s to the low 600s, they think, ‘Well, what else can I do to bump it further.’”

In the past five years in Indianapolis, 13,335 individuals have received one core service, and 10,285 have received bundled services. Of this number, 1,849 increased their credit scores. According to Orr, an estimated 53 percent of the people return for services, and key to this return is providing some type of on-going programming.

“If they’ve established a relationship with a coach, that’s what we want. We don’t want a case that is ‘closed.’ If the person is engaged in healthy budgeting, they may have passed the point of crisis, but working with a financial coach in that same way that people work with a financial adviser on their long-term financial goals. Especially, if they are beginning to put money away in a 401(k) or 527 college savings account, they’re growing assets and managing them. That’s what we hope to see,” Orr said.

Edwards said one of the hurdles they are learning how to overcome is how to get client buy-in. At PACE, a client doesn’t start with financial coaching. Most would never go to a financial coach because they have multiple priorities – finding a place to live, getting a job and re-entering society.

“So the first time the financial coach meets them is usually in the job readiness area, where he’s like, ‘Look, you wonder why I’m here talking to you? Here’s why I’m here talking to you. You are here to get a job, but you have bills, you already have financial commitments. You’re going to come in here and say, “Give me any job.” But in reality, you need to figure out what you need to make so you can pay child support, so you can pay probation. I’m here to help you figure out.’”

PACE started the program in January, and currently its financial coach has a caseload of 50. Most clients arrive without bank accounts, and that is part of the service that is provided. Workshops include sessions with banking partners to help clients open accounts.

“Before Center for Working Families we were trying all these different things to make sure that our clients didn’t go back to jail. Which is still what we’re doing, but now they can say, ‘Hey, you’re still working. Why don’t you come in and let’s do your budget again and see where you’re at, and see if you’re ready for something else.’ It’s just different mechanisms for us. So it gives us some different tools to pull out of the toolbox to figure out.”

While initially Edwards was skeptical, PACE’s criminal justice partners have been open to financial planning. She thought they would wonder why the nonprofit was doing financial coaching when they should have been getting clients jobs or off drugs. Once a client completes a budget, determining what can be paid to the courts, a copy of the budget is sent to probation and parole.

“And that’s good because Probation and Parole is getting their money and the system can keep moving, but then they can really see that the client cannot pay $100 a week, they can only pay $40,” said Edwards.

“They’re not like other people where you can say, ‘Do you want to buy a house?’ For a lot of them, it’s like, ‘Yeah, right. I’m nowhere near that.’ You cannot come at them with some of those big ideas. You’ve got to come a little bit smaller. So it’s being able to say, ‘Well, we can do a budget and see what we can do with your home detention fee,’ then they buy in. Then we can come back and say, ‘OK, let’s look at your credit report.’”

Edwards said that while the population her staff works with has other issues, ultimately all CWF clients have similarities.

“All our populations are coming from the same place, and that’s poverty. It takes a lot of work to get someone out of poverty. Now the road they travel is very different. But I think it’s all the same thing. They’re traveling that road and you just have to help navigate those barriers along the way.

Remember, Ottinger? When enrolled in Family Success, she took a tax course. Every year since then, she and her daughter volunteer at the Hawthorne Community Center. They, along with other volunteers, complete Hawthorne area-residents tax forms for free. She says that it’s her community service and desire to pay it forward.

August 2016