After graduation, individuals tend to have a short gap before transferring. One of the noticeable reasons is that students want to experience and explore the workplace environment. It is normal for students to have great concern about their future work environment. The volunteer positions at Hopelink are a great opportunity for many students who want to experience a workforce environment during a “Tax Season”.

Tax season is the time of the year when individuals and businesses receive tax forms and then file tax returns, and it usually runs from January through mid-April. United Way of King County, one of the U.S. non-profit organizations, is looking for many volunteers across King County under the positions of:

Onsite Tax Preparer
Volunteer tax preparers will provide high-quality assistance to all taxpayers by preparing tax returns, ensuring all eligible credits are claimed, and supporting clients through the tax filing process.

Onsite Intake Volunteer
Intake volunteers are a critical component of sites and are just as important as tax preparers. As an intake volunteer, one will act as a greeter to orient clients as they arrive at the tax site, maintain the site waitlist, ensure that clients have all required documents, and otherwise help maintain the site flow.

Meet with Salem Stafford, UWCK Tax site Manager at Hopelink (one of the nearest locations to Shoreline CC), “Both domestic as well as international students are well-coming to join, and no tax experiences are needed since we will be providing some training before getting started.” Most volunteer staff take one shift per week within 3-4 hours periods long, and the shift will be depending on what date as well as time the volunteer chooses.

Not only the tax knowledge that volunteers can get, but also there will be many more things which individuals will receive after the end of the program. “….being able to experiences real people, life money changing for some people, helping those family and individual struggling, in addition to helping our community it can be a lot of fun, some people really enjoy doing the taxes, but they are also like the social aspect of interacting with the client, and for some people the fun is socially interacting with our team.” Said Stafford.

This will be a great opportunity, specifically for accounting & business students since they will be providing a certification relating to tax skills, and the reference letter which will be useful when students apply to companies. Students can even add this to the experience on their Linkedin profile.

Students can find more information here.