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Our organization started in 2012, when our founder Tatiana Tsoir had her first baby and when motherhood changed her life. That same year her best friend Kristina won a green card and moved to New York with her two-and-a-half year old daughter, and as Tatiana helped her with getting her Social Security number, her first bank account, her driver license, she watched her BFF looking at all of it with an open mouth, mind blown and also very confused.
Kristina was one of many Tatiana helped, one-on-one, holding her friend's hand through all of this new stuff and a new life. Over the years, Tatiana focused on less public, more direct and targeted advice and help those in need directly, as much as she could. Sometimes it was guidance, sometimes money, sometimes skill training, and sometimes just talk. Tatiana believed - and still believes - that true help and support is not a PR stunt, and often goes unnoticed, which doesn't make it any less valuable.
Our mission is education, i.e. we teach people to learn how to fish. We believe in a dignified life that everyone deserves, and that happens not via continuous welfare or unemployment, but in providing someone with a skill to earn a good living, on their own. An engineer, an architect, a doctor, a plumber, a carpenter, a lawyer - all of these and more are skills, i.e. you can always earn a living with it. Accounting is also a skill, and it's one that is probably the easiest to obtain.
Did you know that adults feel more comfortable talking about sex than they do talking about money? Do you know why? The reason is quite simple. If you recall Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you will notice that one of the basic, primal needs (beyond the need for food, sleep, poop) is the need for security, and in the US especially that includes financial security. We need money to exist: to eat, to have a place to sleep, to have a phone; definitely to have and raise a child. It's a basic, primal need that we have. And whenever something threatens it, we sometimes do stupid things.
Issues that threaten our wellbeing and existence attack our core and directly affect our mental health. So having a skill that allows us to be able to make a living no matter what curve ball gets thrown at us, is the one that needs to be nurtured.
Our founder and CEO was a victim of domestic violence many years ago. She was young and didn't know what alcoholism was or how it manifested. She was one of thousands of women and girls subjected to abuse every year. Luckily for her, she didn't have kids at the time, because she'd be forced to be connected to the abuser for the rest of her life. Some women aren't so lucky. In abusive families with kids the abuse is not often only physical and mental, it's also almost always financial, which makes it even harder to ever leave. Especially with children.
By educating moms in the skill of accounting and tax prep we provide them an anchor, and sometimes that anchor is all they've got to hold on to; it's a beacon of hope for many of them to be able to make a good living on their own. This could save or improve a life for a mom and her kids, and help her leave abuse and save her kids. That's how important this work is. And moms get stuff done, believe me.
By educating teens on skills (like accounting or tax prep) we help them get skills they can always count on through life. And maybe get out of - or never get into - violent scenarios and rewrite their own script.
By educating first-generation immigrants we also help them build a better and a happier life, to prevent them being taken advantage of and maybe even help them see light at the end of the tunnel.
The beauty also is that if you're an accounting firm, you can then hire these highly skilled teens, moms, and immigrants to do work for you. And, oh believe me, they'd do anything to make it work. And given today's accounting enrollment and overall profession climate, this is a win-win!
The support we need from you is simple: let's talk and see how many individuals in our first four target groups you'd like to sponsor to get this valuable skill. Let's go over the towns and communities you're hoping to make an impact in and select what's best for you. Our job is to administer applications and provide training, but we cannot do it without you.
CLICK HERE to submit a donor inquiry and connect with us.
