What sort of volunteer or donation related expenses can I deduct?
You can deduct your contributions only if you make them to a qualified organization. Most organizations, other than churches and governments, must apply to the IRS to become a qualified organization.

Deductible as charitable contributions are money or property you give to:

• Churches, synagogues, temples, mosques and other religious organizations
• Federal, state and local governments, if your contribution is solely for public purposes (for example, a gift to reduce the public debt or maintain a public park)
• Nonprofit schools and hospitals
• The Salvation Army, American Red Cross, CARE, Goodwill Industries, United Way, Boy Scouts of America, Girl Scouts of America, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, etc.
• War veterans' groups
• Expenses paid for a student living with you, sponsored by a qualified organization
• Out-of-pocket expenses when you serve a qualified organization as a volunteer

For a list of what's NOT tax deductible as charitable contributions, READ MORE weekly tax tips from Perry Webb, President of Charlotte-based accounting firm, Webtax.

Goodwill is the leading nonprofit provider of job training programs and career services in North America with 165 independent, community-based Goodwill agencies in the United States and Canada (as well as 14 affiliates in 13 other countries). Its goal is simple: to help people find and keep good jobs. And it does just that. Last year, Goodwill provided employment training and job placement services to more than 4.2 million people in the United States and Canada. Here's how it works...

What happens when someone walks into a Goodwill looking for career services? 
Each Goodwill agency is independent and has its own specific procedures for people looking for jobs. Usually, someone on the workforce development staff or a career counselor will obtain background information, work experience, skills (such as computer or customer service skills) and job interests from the person who is seeking assistance. Based on that information, the person will be presented with the programs that fit his or her needs. Sometimes, Goodwill will have specific jobs in mind for that person.

Last year, 79 million people donated to Goodwill and helped fund its career service programs, which yielded job placement for 4.2 million people.

The important thing to remember here is that Goodwill will customize a plan for these individuals, most of whom have limited employability, based on their interests, skills and education. Each individual will receive the necessary job training and support from Goodwill to be successful at his or her job, earn a paycheck, become self-sufficient and know the independence and dignity that work brings. Goodwill not only trains people for careers, but it also helps many to transition into new fields by teaching new skills. 

In which industries does Goodwill help people find jobs? 
Goodwill provides people with job training, employment and support services in a variety of industries, including computer programming, manufacturing, construction and emerging industries, such as technology and health care. 

Local Goodwill agencies build revenues and create thousands of jobs for people who otherwise might be unemployed by contracting with businesses and government to provide a wide range of commercial services. These include custodial, packaging and assembly, food service preparation, document imaging and shredding, grounds keeping, and administrative support. More evidence of the program's success: Every 38 seconds of every business day, a person served by Goodwill earns a good job.
 
How does Goodwill fund its programs?
To pay for its programs, Goodwill sells donated clothes and other household items in more than 2,700 stores and online at shopgoodwill.com. Goodwill uses the revenue earned from these sales to fund job training, employment placement services and other community programs. Goodwill Industries collectively reports $4.4 billion revenues, and 82 percent of those revenues go directly toward supporting and growing critical community-based programs and services. 

Source: Goodwill Industries International 

Don't wait until cold weather arrives, prepare for it beforehand. Planning and preparation are essential for safe driving during winter weather. For a few items to check before the winter weather arrives, CLICK HERE to visit NSM's Risk Management Resource Center to download a PDF of ARCH's Winter Driving Tip sheet.

Risk Reduction tips from Care Providers Insurance Services

Record number of employees are suing their employers. Some estimate that three out of five companies will be sued by an employee. Companies are vulnerable from the pre-hiring process through the exit interview, even if the employee was never hired or only at the company a matter of days.

Wrongful termination, sexual harassment, discrimination and dozens more employment-related risk exposures threaten an organization's bottom line, reputation and marketplace standing. Claims can be embarrassing, costly and result in irreparable brand damage. Most often, these claims evolve from laws and protections brought under federal legislation: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, and Family and Medical Leave Act FMLA. Policing these laws is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

A growing product on the insurance market is employment practices liability (EPL) insurance. These policies protect organizations against employee suits for rights protected under various acts. Managing EPL risk, however, goes beyond adequate coverage.

Reducing employment-related risk
Tools and resources are available to help employers reduce their risk of EPL. These include:

• Developing and implementing an employee handbook. Employee handbooks give employers a venue to communicate personnel policies, employee benefits and work standards to all employees. A handbook ensures documentation of decisions made at all stages of employment. Handbooks can help prevent and deter claims, and better position the employer in litigation. Numerous online resources are available to assist in the development of an employee handbook.
• Maintaining thorough employee evaluations. Accurate and complete evaluations can aid in an employer's defense in wrongful termination and discrimination suits.
• Conducting effective employee conduct evaluations. Have a plan in place to investigate claims that an employee makes against another employee's alleged misconduct.

Training and educating your HR employees. Be sure those in the HR department understand employment law, have HR forms and checklists, post federal and state-specific employment law posters, and stay abreast of federal and state-specific news and regulations.

NIOSH highlights common exposures

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has projected home healthcare work to be the fastest growing occupation through 2016. Home healthcare workers, including home healthcare aides, nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, therapy aides, social workers and hospice care workers, face unique hazards delivering services in patients’ homes and in various diverse communities. Home healthcare workers, while contributing greatly to the well-being of others, face unique risks on the job to their own personal safety and health. During 2007 alone, 27,400 recorded injuries occurred among more than 896,800 home healthcare workers.

Risk exposures include:

Environment. Home healthcare workers face an unprotected and unpredictable environment each time they enter the patient’s community and home. According to estimates of the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII) [BLS 2007a], 330 nonfatal assaults on home healthcare workers occurred in 2006—a rate of 5.5 per 10,000 full-time workers, more than twice the rate for all U.S. workers.

Injury. Home healthcare workers are susceptible to injuries. These may result from overexertion due to transferring patients into and out of bed or to assisting with patient walking or standing. Compared with other workers, home healthcare workers take more frequent sick leave as a result of work-related musculoskeletal symptoms.

Travel. The large amount of driving from home to home exposes the home healthcare worker to risks of vehicular injury or fatality. The 2007 incidence rate for lost workdays from injuries caused by transportation incidents was more than 10 times higher for home healthcare workers than for hospital workers and more than 3 times higher than that of general industry workers.

Other hazards. Home healthcare workers may be exposed to blood borne pathogens, needle sticks, infectious agents, latex, stress, violence occurring in the home or street, verbal abuse, weapons, illegal drugs, and they may encounter animals, temperature extremes, unsanitary conditions in the homes, lack of water, severe weather, or a response to a chemical spill or act of terrorism.

It is important to note that the foundation of any good safety program is a strong management commitment to the safety program. A safety committee should be formed and members should represent the cross-section of employees.

Employees should have a means of discussing their safety concerns and management should have a means of providing information on the company safety plans and policies. Safety training should be part of initial and on-going annual training. 

Adapted from: Occupational Hazards in Home Healthcare, a publication of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which aims to raise awareness and increase understanding of the safety and health risks involved in home healthcare, and suggests prevention strategies to reduce the number of injuries, illnesses and fatalities that too frequently occur among workers in this industry.

Care Providers adds hospice to its coverage classes

In 2010, an estimated 1.581 million patients received services from hospice.  But what is hospice care?

Considered the model for quality compassionate care for people facing a life-limiting illness, hospice provides expert medical care, pain management, and emotional and spiritual support expressly tailored to the patient’s needs and wishes. Support is provided to the patient’s loved ones as well.

Hospice focuses on caring, not curing. In most cases, care is provided in the patient’s home but may also be provided in freestanding hospice centers, hospitals, nursing homes, and other long-term care facilities. Hospice services are available to patients with any terminal illness or of any age, religion, or race.

How is hospice care delivered? Typically, a family member serves as the primary caregiver and, when appropriate, helps make decisions for the terminally ill individual. Members of the hospice staff make regular visits to assess the patient and provide additional care or other services. Hospice staff is on-call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The hospice team develops a care plan that meets each patient’s individual needs for pain management and symptom control. This interdisciplinary team, as illustrated in Figure 1 below, usually consists of the patient’s personal physician, hospice physician or medical director, nurses, home health aides, social workers, bereavement counselors, clergy or other spiritual counselors, trained volunteers, and speech, physical, and occupational therapists, if needed.

Where is hospice care delivered? The majority of patient care is provided in the place the patient calls “home”. In addition to private residences, this includes nursing homes and residential facilities. In 2010, 66.7% of patients received care at home. The percentage of hospice patients receiving care in a hospice inpatient facility increased slightly from 21.2% to 21.9% (from 2009 and 2010).

How many hospices are in operation? The number of hospice programs nationwide continues to increase — from the first program that opened in 1974 to over 5,000 programs (in 2010). This estimate includes both primary locations and satellite offices. Hospices are located in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Extracted from: National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. NHPCO Facts & Figures: Hospice Care in America, 2011 Edition. Click here for the complete report. [www.nhpco.org/files/public/Statistics_Research/2011_Facts_Figures.pdf]

For many kids, riding on the school bus is a time of freedom, friends and fun.

Giving underprivileged families a Head Start

Care Providers Insurance Services is a program administrator for Head Start Programs. Head Start Program Insurance is a critical component of keeping kids and programs protected. It's just one more way that Care Providers cares.

Head Start is a federal program that promotes the school readiness of children ages birth to five from low-income families by enhancing their cognitive, social, and emotional development. Head Start programs provide a learning environment that supports children's growth in the following domains:

• language and literacy;
• cognition and general knowledge;
• physical development and health;
• social and emotional development; and
• approaches to learning.

Head Start programs provide comprehensive services to enrolled children and their families, which include health, nutrition, social, and other services determined to be necessary by family needs assessments, in addition to education and cognitive development services. Head Start services are designed to be responsive to each child and family's ethnic, cultural, and linguistic heritage.

Head Start emphasizes the role of parents as their child's first and most important teacher. Head Start programs build relationships with families that support:

• family well-being and positive parent-child relationships;
• families as learners and lifelong educators;
• family engagement in transitions;
• family connections to peers and community; and
• families as advocates and leaders.

Head Start services
Head Start serves preschool-age children and their families. Many Head Start programs also provide Early Head Start, which serves infants, toddlers, pregnant women and their families who have incomes below the federal poverty level.

Head Start programs offer a variety of service models, depending on the needs of the local community. Programs may be based in:

• centers or schools that children attend for part-day or full-day services;
• family child care homes; and/or
• children's own homes, where a staff person visits once a week to provide services to the child and family. Children and families who receive home-based services gather periodically with other enrolled families for a group learning experience facilitated by Head Start staff.

Over a million children are served by Head Start programs every year, including children in every U.S. state and territory and in American Indian/Alaska Native communities. Since 1965, nearly 30 million low-income children and their families have received these comprehensive services to increase their school readiness.

What responsibilities do youth-serving organizations have regarding child abuse and neglect?

Organizations offering services to children and youth are expected to keep the participants in their programs safe from harm within the context of reasonable standards of care. The applicable standards may change depending upon specific activities, ages of participants, and physical environments in which the programs occur. In addition, standards change over time and differ from one community to the next.
For the most part, standards of care are not well documented unless the program is required to meet licensing or other credentialing requirements. Although standards of care may not be written, nonprofit agencies may be able to point to the regular practices of similar organizations to demonstrate the reasonableness of their care. Your nonprofit must be prepared to demonstrate that it exercised reasonable care. The failure to do so may result in a judgment against your agency. Lawsuits against nonprofits in the child abuse area frequently allege negligence in three areas:

• that the organization failed to exercise sufficient care in the selection of the staff;
• that it failed to properly supervise the abuser; or
• that it allowed the abuser to continue working with children after abuse was suspected.

In addition to exercising reasonable care in programs involving children and youth, organizations
may be required to report suspicions of child abuse or neglect to the child protective services
agency designated by their state’s laws. Failure to report suspected abuse or neglect may result in
a child being harmed or even killed. Failure to comply with mandated reporting statutes may result
in criminal penalties and, in some states, financial responsibility for any harm sustained in
subsequent maltreatment. Also, organizations may be held responsible for significant deviation
from their own self-imposed values or guidelines.

1. Treat the wheelchair as if it has no breaks.  In other words, even when the breaks are locked, stabilize the wheelchair to prevent movement or tipping when the passenger attempts to stand, sit or transfer.
2. Place yourself on the downhill side of the chair to better maintain control when navigating curbs, ramps or steps.

 In addition to these two cardinal rules, “Management of the Wheelchair Passenger” offers many other practical do’s and don’ts when it comes to safely assisting wheelchair passengers. Be sure to share these recommendations from Texas Mutual with all employees and volunteers who assist wheelchair seated individuals.

Following here’s a summary of what you’ll find:

Do...

• Maintain a firm grip on the wheelchair’s handles
• Ask the passenger the passenger how you can help if you’re unsure
• Know the sequence of events before you start assisting the passenger
• Explain what you’re going to do and how if this is the first time you’re assisting the passenger
• Be gentle and avoid squeezing the individual’s arms or legs; they can be sore
• Be patient and remember that handicapped and elderly individuals take longer to complete some tasks and activities.

Don’t...

• Lift the chair by the arms; they may be removable
• Rush, but take your time, move deliberately and be careful
• Surprise a person by taking hold of him unexpectedly
• Encourage personal, social relationships.

Remember

• People who use crutches, braces, and other assist devices must work very hard to get around
• Disabled and elderly people take longer to do things
• Many disabled and elderly individuals are in constant pain.
• People who use crutches and braces may have a difficultly keeping their balance.
• Don’t equate handicap with intelligence