Taxes are Easy When You Don't Have Income

I'm excited to say that during the past two weeks we've had a substantial increase the number of participants in our weekly lessons. I'm not sure whether it's because the sun is staying out a little longer or something else, but I hope that it at least partially reflects on us providing a quality service that is of value to the community.

As mentioned in a previous post, Move with the Music received notifcation of acceptance as a 501(c)(3) non-profit in December of last year. We are registered as a non-profit in Washington state and are licensed to operate in two cities. With those registrations, we've already filed taxes twice this year. The first filing was for the state and the second was for one of the cities in which we are licensed. If there is a bright-side to not having income, it is that filing taxes is really easy.

A year ago, I would have thought otherwise, but non-profits do have to pay taxes on goods sold and services rendered. However, we do not have to pay taxes on the donations we get and neither do doners as long as nothing of substantial value is given in reciprocation for the donation.

Because taxes can come up quickly (and frequently in our case), it is best to make sure you stay on top of keeping good records for any financial transactions your organization has. This is important regardless of whether you have sales, but all the moreso if you're going to have to deal with the organization's taxes. All of us running MwtM work fulltime, so complicated taxes would be a burden if we had to deal with them.

Small Setback

We have had a small setback in our plans. Unfortunately, we have thus far been unable to find a venue for our lessons that fits into our budget. Even the local community centers are priced such that it would be difficult to sustain our programs without taking dependencies on donations, which we feel creates too much risk at this point in time. There are some venues that we might be able to use for a large discount or for free, but they would impose age restrictions, which we are leery of given that we are about making dance accessible to EVERYONE. Nonetheless, we have to start somewhere and if this could give us a sustainable model that we can grow from, this might end up being a fine route to take.

For now, we will continue operating as previously. While we hope to move by April, we have the good fortune of having time to continue exploring the differnt possibilities.

Seperately, we have had the misfortune of losing one of our team members, who is moving out of state. We will miss him and appreciate all the effort he put into helping us have a positive impact on our community.

Back in Action, 2011

This past Monday, we had our first dance lesson of 2011. This month it remains in employer-provided facilities (and is only open to employees and their friends/family), but it was a success. We had about 40 participants and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves a great deal.

Through the month, we will do some final fine-tuning around the structure of our lessons (which have already come a very long way since we started in 2008) in preparation for moving them to a public location opening them up for public participation. We even have a new volunteer to help with lessons. We are all very excited about what's to come in March and are on track with preparations for the transition.

Aside from that, our website is almost complete and can be visited at: http://www.movewiththemusic.org.

Recap: Tasks Involved in Starting a Non-Profit

We are about to start our lessons back up this coming Monday and we are making steady progress towards making them public in March.

We finally have all our registrations and thought we'd recap on a recommended order of doing things. We didn't do things in this order, but in retrospect, it would have made things easier.

1. Do research on the need you want to address and how you might address it.
2. Create a business plan or something close to one.
3. Write the Articles of Incorporation. Be sure to include the right language to register for 501(c)(3) status.
4. Incorporate with the state. Incorporation differs slightly state to state.
5. Register with the federal government to get an Employer Identification Number (EIN).
6. Create a conflict of interest policy.
7. Write the organizational Bylaws.
8. File for 501(c)(3) status with the federal government.
9. Register to operate in the applicable state and city. This may require a master business application and license applications.
10. Open a bank account.

If you plan to employ people, you will probably have one or two additional steps, though we are not familiar with them as we are an all-volunteer organization. A few others items that can be worked on in parallel and don't really need to be done in any particular order include the following.

• Build a team.
• Recruit a board of directors.
• Create a record-keeping process.
• Create a logo.
• Build a website.

Bylaws Ready

We have completed writing Move with the Music's bylaws. We were able to find ample resources online to determine the what the bylaws should contain, created an outline, and filled the document out from there. The legal aspects of the document were largely modeled off of the of other non-profit organizations that we were able to find. Given the legal pertinence of the document, we still have several questions. Because of this, it appears quite important to seek legal counsel at this point to, at a minimum, have the bylaws reviewed. We really want to ensure that they provide the organization (including its directors, officers, and volunteers) with adequate protection, flexibility, and balance of organizational power.

Our board currently consists of only one individual. However, with the bylaws prepared, we are ready to begin seeking candidates to round out the board.

On another note, we will begin planning our return from Winter break tomorrow. We intend to start our dance lessons back up in February. By March, we want to be ready to open our lessons up to the wider community and to do so, we will need to find low-cost facilities. Our area has decent community centers, so we'll be taking a closer look at those. However, we will need to evaluate the associated costs since to our knowledge, the community centers provide non-profits with a discount rather than a fee waiver.

Move with the Music has 501(c)(3) status!

We just received notice in the mail yesterday that we have been approved for 501(c)(3) status! This is huge and will really help to deliver our programs to the community.

On another note, every year we take a break during December and January, during which we pause dance lessons since attendence dwindles off around this time due to the holidays. This should give us time to focus on preparing for the coming year and delivering bigger and better than ever!

A few first steps we need to take: (1) Expand our board and (2) find a good venue to make our programs available to the public.

Still Waiting for the 1023 Results...

It's been a while now and we're still waiting to get the results of the 1023. Fingers still crossed...

On another note, our weekly dance lessons continue on as strong as ever. Usually around this time of year, participation tapers off as we head into the holiday season. However, we have maintained decent attendance. Regardless, we still intend to take our usual break during December and at least the first half of January. We actually find that after breaks, attendance surges, likely due to a build-up of anticipation.