Lin Zhou shares her skills as a Volunteer Income Tax Assistant

Currency of the Heart as expressed in the volunteer activity of an international graduate student from China who helped our CT senior population file their income tax returns.

Lin Zhou, born in China, educated in China and the US, has recently joined KPMG LLP, in the Stamford as a Tax Associate. After her graduation from Fairfield University with an MS in Accounting, she volunteered with Women's Perspective as Social Media Coordinator. She will continue in this capacity, hopefully for a long time.  Lin has a helping habit, a generous heart and a cheerful spirit.  She wrote the piece below describing her volunteer job as income tax preparer for seniors in Bridgeport.

My VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) Experience

VITA is an IRS-sponsored program operated by local volunteers to provide free, confidential, and secure preparation and filing of Federal and State income taxes for taxpayers who qualify.

My story with VITA started in my senior year at college. It was also the second year after I transferred to the U.S. Hoping to have a better understanding of individual tax and wanting to be involved in some volunteer work, I signed up for the VITA program.

My job as a volunteer included greeting clients, helping them file their tax returns, reviewing tax returns prepared by other volunteers, and explaining finalized numbers to the clients. The volunteer experience changes with each VITA site as the target client group varies. I worked at two sites: one had a lot of senior clients and some low income families; the other site was mainly for international clients including international students, scholars, and immigrants. It was interesting to work with people from different backgrounds. I met all kinds of people. For example, some people are talkative. They shared their stories with me.

Some people are quiet. They came to me and just answered the questions I asked, without saying one more word. Although I majored in accounting and had good grades, I was confused about the tax system because I was from a country with a totally different system.  The VITA experience helped me gain real life tax experience. There were many Aha moments, when I assisted my clients with their tax returns. It was very exciting when those Aha moments happened.  The feeling was just like that after conceptual trainings, when a student driver starts and drives a car by himself/herself.

The most valuable aspect of the volunteer work is that I can make a difference for people with my knowledge. There was a time when a lady who came to me with her tax return, was very surprised with the results.

After having calculated and finalized all the numbers I told her she could get couple of dollars refund from IRS. She stared at me for seconds and started to weep. I thought she expected more refunds like many other clients, which happened all the time. Because people always want more money back. I explained to her that the numbers were finalized, so there should be no errors. But I’m happy to go through the tax return again with her. She stopped crying and explained that her own business bankrupted that year and she thought that she still needed to pay hundreds of dollars as in previous years. She said, "I am too happy to cry."

In my past two-year VITA experience, I met many people like her. I did not know what happened in
their life, but I did know that they needed my help. So, after I moved from Colorado to Connecticut to pursue my Master’s degree, I contacted the VITA site coordinator here and continued to volunteer again this year.

Rosemary Williams launched Currency of the Heart to inspire readers to “pay it forward” from the heart’s most precious currency. We’d love to hear from you! To share your story or to request permission to republish this blog post, please email rosemary@womensperspective.org.

'In my dream, the angel shrugged and said, if we faii this time, it will be a failure of the imagination and then she placed the world in my hands.'

- “Imagining World” by Brian Andreas

Hello Everyone,

This blog is about entry points. Where and when does currency of the heart energy enter our world? In the video below, Lucia Aschettino from Connecticut found an entry point for her "currency of the heart" by becoming a mentor to Beatrice Migaliza, from Kenya.

Currently Beatrice is a third year undergraduate student pursuing Computer Science at Ashesi University College in Ghana. She will graduate in 2016 with a Bachelors in Science degree. 

Beatrice Migaliza - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ooTAEkha48

Mentoring opportunities can be found here. www.globalgivebackcircle.org/

Please visit the Global Give Back website. Perhaps you will find an entry point for your heart energy.

Or you might send us your story . We would like to highlight many examples of currency of the heart.

Rosemary Williams launched Currency of the Heart to inspire readers to “pay it forward” from the heart’s most precious currency. We’d love to hear from you! To share your story or to request permission to republish this blog post, please email rosemary@womensperspective.org.

Currency of the Heart: An invitation to life’s dance. 

On New Year’s day, it is my habit to call friends and write thank you notes for kindnesses received during the past year.  As I was writing on January 1st this year, a good friend who died about eight years ago came to mind.  Ken Beirn taught me a great deal about gratitude, kindness and true currency of the heart. His thoughtfulness often lifted my spirits during difficult times.

One day when I was particularly down he bought balloons and conspired with my children to tie them to my chair at the dinner table.  When I came home and saw the colorful bouquet of balloons  I had to smile.

He also took on a grandfatherly role towards my five children, inviting each one for outings, separately and unexpectedly.  No fanfare, no call ahead. He would ring the doorbell and ask if a particular child could come out to play.

“May Lee play tennis with me?”

“May Aimee go for ice cream with me?”

“May Sharon come for a swim with me?”

“Is Tama home? May we talk?”

 “May I take Heather for a walk on the beach?

Again and again, Ken offered us the gift of his time and presence.

Years later he gave me books of E. B. White’s letters with page notations on the inside cover. He underlined the words he wanted me to read. In one particular essay about Walden, Ken underlined the phrase an invitation to life’s dance.  I have come to understand that life’s dance may be the movement between giving and receiving.  When E.B. White was moved by his heart to be in touch with someone, he wrote a letter that spread kindness across the page like jam on bread.

Ken, like E.B.White, was always on the lookout for opportunities to be kind and generous.  Today I pay homage to him and other kind people in my life whose examples of currency of the heart are seeds of this blog.

It is my hope that 2015 is filled with kindness and generosity for you.

Happy New Year.

Rosemary

Rosemary Williams launched Currency of the Heart to inspire readers to “pay it forward” from the heart’s most precious currency. We’d love to hear from you! To share your story or to request permission to republish this blog post, please email rosemary@womensperspective.org.

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Be Bold Daily

I'd like io introduce you to my friend Prill Boyle, author, educator and community volunteer. She regularly pours her generosity or currency of the heart out to the people and organizations in her own backyard.  As the former talk show host of Ageless, a Norwalk  cable television show, to working with Women's Perspective regularly last summer on the creation of a Women's Economic Empowerment Training Manual, to preparing women at Mercy Learning Center for the GED tests, she is engaged locally from Norwalk to Bridgeport.

Prill went back to college in her 30s, graduated from Georgetown University at 38, began teaching at a community college at 40 and wrote the book, Defying Gravity, at 50. The book highlights other women who are "late bloomers" and “accomplished incredible things at an age when most people are beginning to wind down.” 

Perhaps Prill's extraordinary and exhuberant presence in our Connecticut community has to do with her philosophy of life.

"I do a bold thing every day. Every day I try to do something that scares me a little bit. I’ve done it since 2000 and that is how I’ve gotten where I’ve gotten."

One of Prill's great delights is to teach at Mercy Center, in Bridgeport, CT.  She posted this comment and picture on Facebook a week ago..

Excited to be starting another year at the Mercy Learning Center of Bridgeport, Inc. today. It's such a joyful place. This photo, taken last year with my former student Jazmin, her math tutor and me, shows Jazmin holding up her GED certificate. "Educate a woman...educate a family."

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Thank you Prill for sharing your time, life and enthusiasm with all of us. 

To learn more about Prill please listen to her current interview.
 http://chapterbe.com/2014/interviews/prill-boyle-defying-gravity/



Rosemary Williams launched Currency of the Heart to inspire readers to “pay it forward” from the heart’s most precious currency. We’d love to hear from you! To share your story or to request permission to republish this blog post, please email rosemary@womensperspective.org.

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Currency of the Heart as Potluck Supper

Thank you Jennie Ashlock for the story and your patience, another form of "currency of the heart". 

Thursday Nights

How may I describe our Thursday night gatherings so you will understand their meaning?  It is not a clear task, but one which I feel compelled to tackle.  I can begin by telling you that they have occurred for two-and-a-half years.  That is a fact because we started when Annabelle, our youngest participant, was born and she is now that age.  So perhaps it is best to begin at the beginning.

Jennie Ashlock

My apartment was too quiet.  The kitchen was poised like a stage ready for actors but there were none.  Every time I opened the cabinets, the dishes and glassware asked “when are we going to be used?”  The forks and knives were no less verbal.  It was a cacophony of cutlery, silent to all ears but mine.

So I tinkered with ideas and decided, with winter coming on, to invite some women with whom I was acquainted to enjoy a monthly evening of knitting and eating in my home.  We ate and consumed more wine than we produced hats and scarves, but at least I had life in the apartment and the dinnerware was, for now, satisfied.

We took a break that summer and in early autumn, gathered around a friend’s kitchen table in the back of her late nineteenth-century farm house.  Deep afternoon light graced the room with a sapphire hue as it shone through old medicine bottles and glassware trimming the windowsill.  Annabelle, barely one month old, cooed from her carrier in the middle of the table.  It was, as dusk turned to night, like an altar – an infant Appalachian Madonna surrounded by adoring admirers, honoring her and life with jelly jars of red wine sanctified by the holy presence of new life.

As dark fell across the fields and chicken pens, an idea arose that we meet weekly for dinner and invite husbands, significant others and friends to join us.  The idea was intriguing, for we enjoyed the camaraderie offered through these meals. 

If doing a weekly potluck with what has grown into, at times, twelve to fifteen people sounds daunting, I assure you it is possible.  For ease, we rotate homes.  At each meal, a different person self-identifies as the host for the following week.  The process is very organic in that someone, during the course of the potluck, yells-out, “we’ll host next week.”   Then at some point over the next few days, the new hosts send an email stating what they will make (i.e., chickpea ratatouille, dhal, red beans  and rice, ribs, salmon, lentil stew) and the rest of us  respond with what we’ll bring (i.e., something green, “not sure but I’ll be there,” wine, bread, something sweet). 

Managing the menu is clearly not a priority, which means we sometimes have all salads or, as in one night, several potato dishes.  Pizza nights, however, always fall together.  Friends built a cob oven in their garden and on warm summer evenings, we delight over individual pizzas crisp and warm from the wood-fired oven.  Jelly jars, our wine glasses of choice here in the mountains, are full and the pizza ingredients abundant from local farms: mozzarella, goat cheese, sausage, arugala, pesto, and tomatoes. 

As I look around the table each night, I feel gratitude for and comfort in being among this rich, dense amalgam of humanity.  Our ages range from 2 1/2 to 65+ with our newest member to join us sometime in August when he is due to be born.  Professions vary as widely as dietary preferences and religious and political beliefs.  Yet we are lively, loud and immensely entertaining in our being.

I asked the group, over steaming plates of chickpea stew, quinoa, spinach, bread and wine, to share a thought about what these meals mean.  One friend stated that we are like an “intentional community” in that we are intentional about gathering.  Our only breaks are Thanksgiving and Christmas, and as long as two or three can gather, we eat.  We have no social agenda, we do not ask for money or canned goods nor do we all work for one cause; our only cause to be in community.

Tonight we gathered at the park.  It was the first warm, spring evening of the season; a welcome herald of daffodils, vegetable gardens and fireflies.  Annabelle spent dinnertime running between the table for nibbles of hotdog and the slide and sandbox.  Avram and I played a wicked game of Frisbee on the basketball court while others held a heady conversation about the pharmaceutical industry around the picnic table.

When dusk arrived, I walked up the hill to my home where I proceeded to nurse a thumb bruised from an awkward frisbee catch.  Later that night, I sat on the front porch with my bare feet propped on the railing where a moist breeze danced over exposed skin.  I took-in deep breaths, filling my body with the scent of fresh earth and an impending rainstorm.  Meanwhile, inside, all was silent and content.


Rosemary Williams launched Currency of the Heart to inspire readers to “pay it forward” from the heart’s most precious currency. We’d love to hear from you! To share your story or to request permission to republish this blog post, please email rosemary@womensperspective.org.