Sunday, March 20, 2011 at 09:30AMToday we placed an announcement on our donation web page that we will be unable to accept donations from North Dakota, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia. Hopefully this will just be the situation for this year, but I wanted to explain briefly why this is.
To become a non-profit Her Star Scholars incorporated in New York State, then received an employer identification number, then we applied for tax exempt status from the IRS. Piles of paperwork and a number of hefty fees considering the size of our organization. However, we made it through on the first try because our mission is clear, nobody is taking home a salary, we have a strong conflict of interest policy, we are accountable, and our process is transparent.
Then comes the tricky part. Each state has its own standards, fees, and paperwork requirements for registering non-profits and licensing them to fund-raise. In some states we had to evaluate whether the cost of registration was ultimately higher than the amount of money we were likely to raise within that particular state.
If you happen to reside in one of the states where we cannot accept donations, please let us know. We can then take that in to account when we are re-register with the states for 2012.
