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Unread 17-01-2013, 14:15
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JesseK JesseK is offline
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FRC #1885 (ILITE)
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Rookie Year: 2005
Location: Reston, VA
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Re: White House Petition for FIRST Funding

Quote:
Originally Posted by IKE View Post
I had been interested in an idea similar to this. I called it:

"Mentor Match".

If your program was an approved Mentorship Program, then mentors could apply for a Federal Match when filing for their taxes. The match would be an exemption that would be the equivalent of up to the minimum wage value x 200 Hrs. maximum. For instance, if you make $20/hour of $40K/year, your federal income tax rate is probably on the order of 10%. 200 hours = $4,000 deduction which would in turn be paid to your charity to the tune of $400. Assuming a minimum wage of $7/hr, then the cap would be $1,400. This would be the approximate deduction for someone making $100k/year or more (At $100K your income tax rate is around 14%, 200 hours at $50/hr = $10,000 * 14%= $1,400).

My thought was to keep it fairly general in the sense of "Mentorship Programs" so that programs like Big Brother Big Sisters, Scouts, 4-H, .... Might be able to get some additional benefit from the hours a Mentor provides.
+1 for this idea. Virginia has a tax deduction for individuals who volunteer on a company's behalf, and the companies get to deduct that person's hourly rate up to a certain amount (if I read the tax law correctly...). It really helps small businesses out who also support their community. I had plenty of people tell me "yea, you can do it" -- except an individual cannot deduct from their own personal taxes >facepalm<.

I'd say that it needs to be capped though (to reduce abuse & address fiscal issues), and the audit trail needs to be standardized. I know I put in 500-700 hours a year into overall mentorship activities, and at my hourly rate that would be quite a chunk of change in deductions as well as quite a nightmare to track/audit/verify.

It'd give incentives to people who mentor. That is, IMO, the biggest hurdle to FRC team sustainability. Individual team funding will come with that, eventually.
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