FocusFirst Screening Identifies Rare Coats' Disease                    in Two Year Old Prichard Boy

 Coates___photo

A recent FocusFirst screening at Carmen's Daycare in Prichard revealed a vision abnormality in a two-year-old boy (above) that doctors ultimately diagnosed as Coats' Disease, a rare eye disorder.

The boy was referred to St. Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, where he received treatment. His doctors and parents are optimistic that he will retain his sight.

Coats' Disease is a rare eye disorder most commonly found in young boys. If it progresses untreated, it can lead to blindness, and doctors may be forced to remove the affected eye.


Impact Staff Presents Tax Findings to IRS

On September 2, Impact Alabama participated in a public forum held by the IRS in Washington D.C. to discuss options for regulating commercial tax preparation.

Impact staff presented IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman with a report detailing the non profit's undercover investigation of commercial tax preparers during the 2009 tax season and subsequent work toward the passage of legislation that would promote regulation of the industry in Alabama.  In June, Shulman announced that the IRS will propose a comprehensive set of recommendations to increase tax preparer competency and taxpayer compliance by the end of the year.  


Meet Impact's New Staff!

Impact’s new staff includes graduates of The University of Alabama, Samford, Birmingham-Southern College, Emory, Harvard, Yale, Vanderbilt, and the University of Pennsylvania. To learn more about them, click here.




Impact Initiatives Record Biggest Successes Yet

During the 2008-2009 academic year, Impact’s three signature initiatives achieved their greatest successes to date.

FocusFirst: During the 2008-09 school year, Impact staff and trained college students from across the state screened over 24,500 children in 848 Head Starts and daycares for vision problems. Over the last five years, FocusFirst, in a partnership with Vision Research Corporation, has provided vision screenings to more than 59,000 children in all 67 counties across the state, with approximately 11.7% of the children failing the screenings and receiving subsidized follow-up care as necessary through our partner nonprofit, Sight Savers America.

SaveFirst: in just its third year, SaveFirst has become the largest EITC-focused volunteer tax initiative in the state. Last spring, SaveFirst trained over 400 college, graduate, and law students from more than ten campuses who prepared 2009 tax returns for more than 2,600 working families in Alabama - helping them to claim $4.7 million in refunds and saving them over $670,000 in commercial preparation fees.

SpeakFirst: The four SpeakFirst students who graduated from Birmingham-area high schools in May 2009 received over $700,000 in college scholarships. They and the eight 2008 graduates, who earned over $1 million in combined scholarships, have demonstrated that SpeakFirst holds the potential to offer its students enormous opportunities.

See www.impactalabama.org  for more details.



Staff Doubles from 12 to 24 To Better Meet State's Needs 

Impact_Staff_Photo__2009_2010_small

 Thanks to its cost-effective business model that capitalizes on the commitment of recent college graduates to serving their community, Impact recently began a new academic year by welcoming its largest staff to date.

We continue to attract the highest quality college graduates to serve with our organization as full-time, stipend-based volunteers for one year. As of July 2009, we have doubled our staff from 12 to 24 members. The new staff was selected from a field of over sixty applicants, the most Impact has ever received and a reflection of the recent nation-wide rise in applications to service-oriented programs targeting recent graduates, such as Teach for America and the Peace Corps. Amazingly, the majority of our incoming staff attained an undergraduate GPA of 3.8 or higher.