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©(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©(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.
What is your annual income at the moment and do you think you can transition to your own 501c3 in a reasonable time frame. I am the director of a 501c3 which I am, for lack of a better word, “holding” until I have free time to do something with it. If you would like to discuss offline, send me a dm or just email me at my user name at gmail. This would have to be temporary and there would be some expenses for legal I’m sure, but as long as I can stay under my irs reporting threshold it should be minimal.
speaking personally: no, probably not. there are a lot of hurdles we’d have with trying that even in non-rushed circumstances. separately i think it’s unlikely an arrangement of this sort would work. over the past 5 months we’ve averaged about $415/mo after expenses, which works out to around $5,000 a year. taking contributions before expenses this is probably closer to $7,200 or more over a given 12 month interval.
Interesting. That’s well under the limit for reporting and filing a detailed return, presuming there aren’t any other flags or limitations. The biggest stumbling block would be filtering international donations from sanctioned entities and regions, I suppose. TBH, I think the other (active) non-profit board I sit on has never actually worried, but we don’t have any members (donations coming from) outside of NA , UK and EU.