I have spent the last 38 years in public service, if you include four years in the Army. I think this is the work that we should have been doing all along. Our innovation is not all that innovative. City government is not that interested in sharing, but we have developed a shared leadership team and a number of coalition partners -- United Way, Catholic Charities, Annie E. Casey Foundation and others. A number of external supporters include non-profits, public entities, financial institutions and community organizing groups. There is a growing competition among financial institutions to financially sponsor local sites. We have been overwhelmed this year because of a lot of favorable press, especially in the Spanish-language media.

Our goals are simple -- maximize the credits, and connect people with financial services and multi-benefit services. The coalition work takes constant effort and renegotiation. This is especially frustrating for a government agency because we like things to be regular and orderly. We have kept our leadership team very small on purpose. Our goals get massaged throughout the year. We must be flexible because everyone has something come up. It was the strength of this coalition that allowed us to deal with the 30,000 Katrina victims who moved into our community over a weekend.

We wanted to change the field. We wanted nonprofit and government groups to include family financial success as part of their goals, even if they run a rape crisis hotline. We have some influence because we provide a lot of funding for these groups. We want to bundle services together and imbed family economic success in everything that we do.

The work that we need to do in the near future is the split refund. We will work with the people that families are indebted to -- hospitals, utilities and courts. We want to create locations at these sites. We want to split the family's refund between the family and the organizations to whom they own money. This can help keep the lights on. This can help people pay their fines so that they can get jobs, get a driver's license and not fear incarceration. We are also working to help people get car loans -- without a car, you can't get a job.

We coordinate the Delaware EITC Campaign, and we coordinate a number of other programs to help lower income families to become financially independent, including a car loan program. Our EITC Campaign is in its fifth year, and we try new things every year to seek out sustainability. How can we keep on going when I want to move on to something else? (There are a lot of other things that I am interested in exploring and pioneering.) How will the program go on after I'm long gone? We have experimented with IT and we have adopted Fred Gordon's model for volunteer recruitment and training.

Last year, we had 19 locations throughout the state. We have 780,000 people in the entire state. Most of the people live in the urbanized area in the north. There is about a third of the population in the lower two-thirds of the state. One of our partners recommended a terminal-server strategy - we would have a high-powered offsite server to help manage tax returns. Each of the sites would have lower-powered terminals with high-speed broadband access. This kept most of the system centralized. I raised the money to buy this system, and we got it in place. By the time it was all done, it was tax time, and we did not have time to do any testing. Taxwise does not support terminal-server networks, and our partner had a merger and could not support us any longer. So when one person had an error on a terminal, everyone using the software at all of the sites saw the same error and the system crashed. So we went back to using the C-drive -- doing it like we did the first year. We do have a brand new server if anyone wants to buy it!

This year we have gone to a peer-to-peer network with Taxwise on each C-drive. This has worked so well that I found two days to come to this meeting in the middle of tax season!

We have developed university partnerships. We developed a course composed of tax training and community service. This helps our volunteer recruitment efforts.

I spent over 20 years in commercial banking at Bank of America, the Federal Reserve and Providian. I learned that there was technology out there to help low-income households, and that this technology is not well-known in the nonprofit world. I had been researching stored-value cards at Providian, and I brought that to the nonprofit world.

I hooked up with the Center for Community Change to explore Worker Centers. These are for people who drive taxis, etc. Unions cannot organize these groups. We have identified about 140 Worker Centers around the country. They have a huge demand to help with workers' rights, but they are underfunded. They do consumer education around ESL, workers' rights, and parenting. They wanted to stabilize their own finances by stabilizing the finances of their constituents.

We did a number of interviews and focus groups of the Worker Center constituents. We discovered that Stored-Value Cards (SVC's) -- prepaid debit cards -- would be extremely valuable. We are going to use a community organizing model. We will offer financial classes and explain how stored-value cards can help them. This is a much better way to send money back home, which 80% of them do. We will use the collective bargaining power of these workers to increase our negotiating position. Of the 480 families that we interviewed, they made $7.8 million last year and they transferred $1.6 million out of the country.

Why are these cards valuable? They are a virtual savings account, a Visa card, a money transfer tool, and more. They can pay bills online using the Worker Center Internet terminals. They cannot be stolen like cash. There are very basic ID requirements -- you don't need a Social Security Number. These cards are much more portable than banking relationships -- they will even work internationally. They are extremely convenient -- you don't have to rely on banking hours.

The community network is very valued and trusted by the users, and the providers are very interested in negotiating with us -- they're not sure how to price and sell these products otherwise. We are rolling out an 8-site pilot program to develop a roll-out template with implementation options. The 140 Worker Centers have access to three million households. The larger our scale, the greater our power to negotiate consumer-friendly terms with business partners. It should not be so expensive to be poor in the US.

We are a tiny little organization that has the audacity to talk about scale. I am here because I'm opportunistic. You deal with a population that I am very interested in helping. The savings rate in the US is negative. I want to get some of the money that people get from their tax return, but I want to get it for their own savings, not for myself.

If you want to go fishing for people who are un-banked, where do you go? 32% of the EITC filers with bank accounts went to Block, but 75% of the un-banked filers went to Block. People interested in saving tend to go to volunteer sites. Splitting is the option to send of your tax refund to different places. Splitting will be the rule next year, but we need to encourage people to actually use it.

Our theme has been "Spend Some, Save Some". We cannot force people to save, so we have to make it easy. Splitting makes it easier. How can we make it even easier for people who want to save to save? What products could you put in a tax form that would make people think about saving? US Savings Bonds are a good option - they offer a pretty good rate, there are no fees, and you can get out any time you want after one year. There are probably better options out there, and I want you all to develop them, but the Savings Bond is a good place to start.

How can we create incentives? We might be able to find benefits for savings.

Finally, how can we get people to want to save? This product has been around for over 300 years. If you put money into savings, you get a lottery ticket where you might win a lot more money. If you lose the lottery, you've still got your money in savings. We are trying to change the laws to make this legal. We're starting to offer savings bonds next week at several test sites around the country.

There is something very exciting about Mary's university program. You have changed the value proposition for tax preparation volunteers. Now the beneficiary is not just the refund recipient -- it's also the volunteer. Out of the experience of preparing taxes, the volunteer develops financial literacy!