I'll be out of town this weekend, and I know several others said they
would be out of town too. We should still have a meeting, right? I
know it was mentioned that this might be the first meeting where would
start taking up a collection so we can begin to accumulate some
money. I swear I'm not just trying to skip out on that (I'm in a
wedding)!
I just called Taza to reserve the space (not that that really seemed
to be necessary last time) and they were closed. So, I guess I'll
call them tomorrow at some point.
Let's see, what else... be sure someone takes minutes for those of
us that will not be there.
So I would really like to know ahead of time… What is our incorporated status?
Has the paperwork even been filed? I have not heard any updates on this matter and we have several major things waiting on it. If we need to I could probably do the paperwork on legalzoom tonight but I doubt we would have our Fed TaxID by Sat But who knows…
She should consider setting up a treasurer as well. I would imagine that every member should be able to see the current financial situation but only a few (maybe 2) ppl can actually cut checks and are responsible for paying the bills.
Maybe we should vote on who that is… or let ppl volunteer to do it and we will just let the highest credit score win
I have the paperwork and it’s mostly filled out but not yet filed. What’s the rush on getting our federal tax ID by Saturday? I think you need to chill out.
Appointing a treasurer will be part of the standard board election, which has obviously yet to take place.
I believe you mentioned we can not handle money (or early membership fees) until we had a bank account which was dependent on the paperwork being submitted and a federal tax id. I thought that was the take away from the last meeting so that in this meeting we could discuss money. That was my only concern and hence the implied rush.
Once we file our articles of incorporation with the state (note, not the Feds) they will issue us some ID numbers. Filing for tax exempt status with the Feds is an additional, more complicated filing dependent on successful registration with the state. I am handling all of this paperwork, but the process is far from instantaneous.
Until all of the paperwork is filed and returned we can’t open a bank account wherein we could store any funds collected. We can start taking money at any time, as long as there is a trusted way to account for it (it counts as income for the business) and to store it (be that in a bank account or held by a trusted party or whatever). The last time I incorporated in Ohio, it took about a month for them to return all of the appropriate information.
There is absolutely zero reason to turn to a third party like “legalzoom” to accomplish these tasks for us.
There’s nothing that says we have to wait before collecting money, but I was of the opinion (and stated as such) at the last meeting that we should wait to collect money until we have more of those things in place.
As far as money topics go, I would suggest the discussion at the next meeting center around what costs we may incur prior to finding a space (including a possible “first month’s rent” deposit) for which we should think about collecting funds in advance. Also, we need to determine the status of those funds; are they pre-payment of eventual membership fees, or simply donations given out of good will, etc.
Cool. I figure the 501c3 thing is an eventuality one way or another, good to hear there may be some cool ideas.
I’m about to start ramping up my personal efforts to find spaces to present to the group, as this seems to be our largest continual sticking point.
The next meeting day is set to be 6/6, per the norm, but unfortunately I’m not able to make that date due to attending a wedding. With us coming into summer, I know my weekends are going to be harder and harder to find with free days, especially a Saturday.
I move we change our meetings to a weeknight rather than a weekend. Thoughts?
Both can be equally hard for me to attend. I could look into a way that we could do some type of online meeting system. So whenever we choose to have the meeting at least those that can not attend can either dial-in via VoIP or on the web (depending on what I have the resources to put together).
It might have to be a bit jury-rigged in the beginning, like somebody may have to dial into one of the VoIP lines and put it on speaker…
I’ll spend some time this week looking at solutions and see what I can come up with.
But who knows…
