[Steering Committee] Legal Status

[Brian Sheldon]

My mother is part of the Washington County Cherokee Alliance and the
Cherokee Nation recently invited all these 'alliance' groups to a weekend of
meetings. One of the things they had seminars on was non-profit stuff. My
mother sent me copies of all the stuff they got. I quickly went thru it last
night and the only thing I found that might be of use is this group:

http://oklahomacenterfornonprofits.org/default.asp

I'll take a closer look at the stuff she sent and maybe scan it and email
it...

Brian

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Jason Lee <jason at steeplesoft.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 7:37 PM, ryan hoegg <ryan.hoegg at gmail.com> wrote:
> > OK let me know when, and I'll try to be there.  I'm in town the rest of
> the
> > month.  Thanks for doing the legwork on this!
>
> Actually, I had lunch with them last Thursday. :P  Here's what I found.
>
> They didn't like the idea of the charitable non-profit.  They said
> your donors have to be really varied to qualify.  If they're not, then
> you lose charity status and become a foundation, at which point you
> have to give away a certain amount of money (they though maybe 5%) to
> charities of some sort.  Fail to do that, and you lose your legal
> status altogether and we're back to square one.
>
> What they suggested is this:  First, they set us up as a non-stock
> entity.  That will get us the legal liability shielding we're after,
> and will cost about $500 to get everything prepared and filed.  Once
> that's done, if we want to keep going, we can pursue "business league"
> status (which I think is the 501c6 we've discussed).  This gives us
> non-profit status, and will allow our sponsors some tax benefits in
> that they will be able to write off dollar-for-dollar anything they
> give to us.  It will also allow us to buy things for the JUG tax free,
> if I recall correctly, so we all benefit.  They haven't gotten a good
> handle on what it will take from them in terms of hours, etc., and
> they're not sure at this point that we'd even qualify as a business
> league, but they're estimate on cost is that it could "easily" be at
> least $1,000, so we may want to rethink that part.  I don't know, but
> we can discuss it in detail at our SC meeting on the 28th.
>
> By the way, for what it's worth, I related to them our original idea
> about teaming up with the .net guys, and described the response of my
> other lawyer friend ("Eww" while making a funny face).  Mark's
> response, "I was thinking the same thing but didn't want to say
> anything."  I got the impression that he thinks it's probably legally
> possibly, but not advisable due to the possible commingling of funds
> and fund raising, etc.  That's off the table, I think, but thought it
> might be of interest.
>
> --
> Jason Lee, SCJP
> Mojarra and Mojarra Scales Dev Team
> https://mojarra.dev.java.net
> https://scales.dev.java.net
> http://blogs.steeplesoft.com
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