Community Economic Development Clinic Projects

Making Taxes Less Taxing

Since 2002, Community Economic Development Clinic students have organized, managed and operated free tax sites in the City of Buffalo to ensure that working lower-income families maximize their Earned Income Credit refunds. The clinic chairs the Self-Sufficiency Coalition, and law students helped to secure more than $500,000 in foundation support for this project. In 2006 alone, the Free Tax Prep Network saved Buffalo residents more than $1 million in preparation and loan fees.

A major success is the clinic’s role in creating the Free Tax Preparation Network for low-income Buffalo residents, which it organized as part of the Economic Self-Sufficiency Coalition of Western New York. The tax effort, with a retired Internal Revenue Service agent as a staff resource person, will operate under a $450,000 grant from the John R. Oishei Foundation.

The goal, Breen said, is to “allow lower-income families to avoid high-priced tax preparers. Many of these families have extremely simple tax returns but get charged very high fees and often access refund anticipation loans,” at notoriously high interest rates. Clinic students train volunteers to prepare tax returns in low-income Buffalo neighborhoods.

Many families are eligible for state and federal Earned Income Tax Credit funds, which can total as much as $5,700 a year. “We want to preserve as much of that as possible for families,” Breen said, rather than see it siphoned off by for-profit tax preparers and rent-to-own stores. One thing that keeps poor families poor, she said, is not just low income, but lack of assets to access in an emergency.

The Business of Child Care

Since 2005, clinic students have assisted with research and outreach relating to Buffalo Child Care Means Business, a publication launched in November 2006 with the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, the United Way’s Success by 6 Program, and the Child Care Resource Network. The project documents how quality child care contributes as a business sector to Buffalo’s local economic development.

In 2007, law students will help write a manual identifying ways employers can increase the money available to employees for child care through tax credits and increase participation in flexible spending accounts through short-term loans for up-front expenses.

Living Wage

Also part of the Community Economic Development Clinic has been Clinical Instructor Sara A. Faherty’s work on Buffalo’s living wage ordinance. That law specifies that businesses that do work for the city must pay their employees enough that a 40-hour workweek brings them above the poverty level.

Faherty said students have become very interested in the work, including attending meetings of the city’s Living Wage Commission, researching proper enforcement of the law, and studying how it might be expanded.

“Students love this work,” she said. “And because this is about enforcement of the ordinance, when there are issues, they quickly become legal issues. Students learn a lot about local ordinance-making and the processes of municipal government in Buffalo and in general.”

A major conference in September 2007 called “The High Road Runs Through the City: Advocating for Economic Justice at the Local Level” provides an opportunity to explore recent experiments in local democracy to address problems of low-wage work, poverty, and inequality and includes a workshop on “New Frontiers for the Living Wage.”

Playing Safe in the East Side

In another high-impact project, clinic students worked with an East Side group called Fruit Belt United to rehabilitate a dilapidated children’s playground. Bringing together partners including Home Depot, the City of Buffalo, and KaBOOM!, a national playground technical assistance and funding initiative, the clinic helped to create a safe play space for neighborhood children who would otherwise have no place to play within walking distance. The next steps with the East Side group may include opening an after-school community center.

Growing Green

The Community Economic Development Clinic has worked with the Massachusetts Avenue Project’s Growing Green Program. Growing Green is an urban, organic agricultural training program that develops life-skills and provides meaningful work to low-income, at-risk youth. Growing Green develops models for community revitalization through sustainable urban agriculture, youth entrepreneurship, and food systems development.