Looking for jobs, preparing resumes, filling out income tax forms over and over again; it sounds like a college student’s nightmare. But for the approximately 50 Northwestern students who are members of National Student Partnerships, it’s something they look forward to.
Members of the NU chapter of NSP work two hours a week helping local residents with services such as income tax assistance and finding employment or housing.
“People come in and their lives are falling apart,” said former Local Director Sohil Shah, a Weinberg junior. “We can kind of help them in every facet of their lives.”
NSP, a national student-led organization with 15 offices on the East Coast and in the Midwest, aims to connect students with the communities around them. Shah said that in Evanston the socioeconomic gap between students and local residents is particularly glaring.
“There’s such a need for help in Evanston, and I think people really buy into that,” Shah said.
The Evanston office, founded in 2001, has more volunteers than any other NSP location, Shah said. It is staffed solely by Northwestern students and one full-time employee, Lia Silver, the AmeriCorps*VISTA site coordinator and a 2005 graduate of Miami University of Ohio. Her job involves organizing the volunteer effort and is traditionally a year-long position filled by recent college graduates.
Silver, the site coordinator, said the ultimate goal for an NSP office would be to operate without her position. The Evanston office would be one of the first to reach that objective, she said.
The group works out of an office located in the U.S. Department of Labor One-Stop Center on Oak Street. Clients often go to the same building to file for unemployment and then ask NSP for help creating a resume or finding a new job. This year, the Evanston office saw more than 900 clients, Shah said.
Recently, 20 members of the group focused on helping clients with their income taxes. This year, they filed 95 tax returns and saw more than 125 clients, more than any other NSP site, Shah said. The Evanston office first offered income-tax assistance last year. It was one of the first NSP locations to do so.
Most of the time, group members helped clients apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit, a federal credit for low-income working individuals and families, Shah said.
The group has mandatory training sessions once a week and spent several hours learning about income taxes, but members said helping clients with their taxes was still difficult.
“This is serious stuff and you don’t want to play around with it,” said current Local Director Jessica Hamerslough.
Students said they often looked questions up and sometimes called the IRS for help.
“(Clients) are patient because they know that taxes are hard and we’re just college students,” said Marcy Baskin, a Weinberg junior and the group’s public relations co-chairwoman.
Group members said they relish the one-on-one connections they make with clients, who often come in multiple times.
“I walk out of the office and I know that I’ve actually helped someone,” said Hamerslough, a Communication junior.
Current Local Director Molly Day said working with NSP made her reflect on her own life.
“There’s so many days I go into the office stressed out about relatively stupid stuff,” the SESP junior said. “It really just puts things in perspective.”
Reach Diana Samuels at [email protected].
