Hello folks, this is an impromptu emergency announcement.
In short: Open Collective Foundation, the fiscal host we use for Beehaw, will no longer accept donations starting on March 15, 2024. They will shut down completely at the end of the year, December 31, 2024. This was an extremely sudden decision by them; we were only made aware of it last night through their email to us. The cause given is "Open Collective Foundation’s business model is not sustainable with the number of complex services we have offered and the fees we pay to the Open Collective Inc. tech platform;" they note that they froze accepting new collectives last year.
This obviously presents a lot of problems for Beehaw. Here are all the relevant dates given to us by Open Collective:
- Last day to accept funds/receive donations: March 15, 2024
- Last day collectives can have employees: June 30, 2024
- Last day to spend or transfer funds: September 30, 2024
- Day they formally dissolve: December 31, 2024
Because Open Collective holds our funds, based on our understanding it seems likely we will not be able to keep our existing funds unless we find a 501(c)(3) organization to be our new fiscal host or become one ourselves by September 30. (EDIT: Or, we just spend it all preemptively.)
Open Collective Foundation's also email writes that:
We will be providing assistance and support to you, whether you choose to spend out and close down your collective or continue your work through another 501(c)(3) organization or fiscal sponsor.
and so we'll be contacting them as soon as possible to see if we can arrange a solution with just their help.
But: in the mean time (and in case they can't help us, given the suddenness of this announcement) we need your help to find solutions--and we will probably need them urgently. If you have any help you can provide us, any services you can recommend, or anything that might help us quickly (and as painlessly as possible, given the short notice) transition to another service, that would be greatly appreciated. Fair warning that this will also likely derail the March financial update until we have a clearer picture of what we'll do and if OCF can help us going forward.
Thanks, and hopefully we can resolve this situation without difficulty.
I'm confused, can't you register as a 501c3? I know there are some hurdles, but I thought that wasn't so hard as to be impossible.
Either way, This sounds very stressful. I'm with you.
The most difficult part is creating the charter and selecting the appropriate category; after that it's a small filing fee (most states) and - as long as you stay under $50k income - a trivial tax reporting burden. I'll be filing two returns - one for MD and one for VA - for two non-profits I'm on the board of this weekend. I'll be done before breakfast. They both have federal EINs and both are small enough we use Excel for ledger (since QuickBooks has gone to online-only annual extortion as their business model). Without paid employees or stockholders (just a board of directors), edit: and have no substantial physical property, and without donations coming from prohibited individuals or sanctioned stated, there is diminishingly little paperwork. If it's just a virtual organization with leased remote assets like web services, the bar is pretty low. Maryland has no annual fee; Virginia has a small one ($75, I believe) to maintain the corporation.
The organization's I'm involved in are beyond that part so I never was exposed to those difficulties. I guess all the hard work's done for me already right?
LOL - the paperwork is the easy part. Getting money and keeping the org alive and relevant is the real work. But I think you know that. ;-)
It's a real task