Overview...

What started as an awareness raising and ethnographic styled walk through Sierra Leone, this site now details the encounters of a not so academic academic who spends more time occupying Wall Street and squats than a university...

Sunday, August 1, 2010

To Non-Profit or Not...

So should the non-profit start before or after the trek?  I just had a long talk with my chief advisor (aka my mother) and she thinks it best to wait till after.  Obviously if you scroll down this linked list of related posts there have been other discussions about this, and it is especially an issue to undertake in Sierra Leone, but it is till an issue.

I find myself really up against a wall with so many things to do to get it all done by myself.  Incorporating is a simple process - if its what you do for a living.  A lawyer who knows what they are doing could get into this and be done with it in hours, I am sitting here trying to read all the IRS's tax codes and New York State incorporating guidelines.  Not that I am complaining, I am doing it because this is the way I like to do things.  I want to know fully what the implications and limitations of becoming a Non-profit are and how then to construct the company.  In order to do something I think you need to do it right.

This is my mother's point.  Focus for the time being on the trip, then do the non-profit once I'm back.  "Things will be a lot clearer then and you will have a firmer idea of exactly what you will be doing, it also might be easier to get donations."  The logic is sound.  Rather than working over the next couple months to learn all there is to know about backpacking and Sierra Leone, and setting up and running an entire non-profit company operating on multiple continents, she is saying save the company for after.  As far as mental space in the brain, this does make a good amount of sense.


I think it has been a goal of mine to set up a non-profit though for years, and its something I really want to do - perhaps an exercise in patience is needed!!  But it also effects the concept of donations.  Would people donate to 'me' or a non-profit?  I'm not tax deductible!!  This motherly advice is as well in synch with what NYCON advised as well.  So I ask you, all 5 of my followers!!!  lol.  What do you think??  Should I put my focus into the trip, and the country, and the language, or into those things with an inherently forced lesser degree of intensity so that I can also go there as an affiliate of my own non-profit?  Hmmmm...  Comments welcomed!!

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