Valerie Wilson and her family
Helping Employees Build Wealth
Valerie Wilson knows the importance of credit. “Many people don’t understand credit or have a bank account. If you don’t manage your money, you’ll be taken advantage of. You’ve got to take responsibility. You can’t give back to your community if you’re flat broke.”
Valerie should know. As a young mother of twins, working full-time and attending community college at night, she struggled with household finances, loan repayments, a mortgage, and mounting credit card bills. But in 2002, she enrolled in TRF’s free tax assistance program offered to her at work and began receiving individual credit counseling. Her debt is steadily decreasing.
The free tax assistance program is part of TRF’s Human Resource Services offered to all TRF portfolio companies. The service is designed to help companies and their employees connect to a variety of resources.
Now the director of the largest Brightside Academy child care center in Philadelphia, Valerie adamantly promotes TRF’s free tax assistance program to her own staff. "I know that I could not be in this place in life without TRF. Now I want to share the goodness and wealth." Valerie, now co-President of the academy’s Financial Advancement Network Club, leads discussions around homeownership and credit with other center directors.
For the past two years, her center boasted the highest overall tax return out of all Brightside sites in Philadelphia. In the 2005 tax season, Valerie and TRF helped 20 of her employees collect almost $53,000 in federal tax refunds, representing over 5% of the $1 million in refunds awarded to TRF’s 400 program participants. For the 2006 tax year, with 85% of her 46 person staff enrolled, Valerie’s site expected to continue to top the charts. But Valerie isn’t content just yet. “I still need to get that 15%,” she explains. “But I’ll get there.”