Lakeshore Civic Review
An independent review of how community organisations on Ohio north coast are governed, funded and held to account: nonprofit boards, local giving, public space and the machinery of municipal government.
Latest
- When a community group should incorporate, and when it should not
Incorporation brings limited liability and permanent filing obligations. Plenty of groups take on the second without needing the first.
- How to read a Form 990 in fifteen minutes
The annual return of a US nonprofit is public. Four parts of it answer most of the questions people actually have.
- Open meeting rules catch more bodies than people expect
Advisory committees, authorities and some nonprofit boards operating public facilities fall inside open meeting requirements they have never considered.
- Who actually maintains the park, and what happens when nobody does
Maintenance responsibility for shared space is often split between a municipality, a nonprofit and a developer agreement nobody has read since it was signed.
- Matching gift programmes are unclaimed because nobody asks
Employer matching is among the most straightforward income available to a small organisation, and it mostly goes unused for administrative reasons.
- Restricted funds, and the small organisations that spend them twice
A donation given for one purpose cannot be used for another. The rule is simple and the bookkeeping that enforces it usually is not.
- Safeguarding for organisations that never thought they needed it
A food pantry and a youth sports club have the same exposure as a large charity, and usually a fraction of the process.
- What a nonprofit board actually has to write down
Minutes are the only durable record of how a decision was reached. Most small boards keep them badly, and only discover it when somebody asks.