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(c)(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(c)(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.
yeah, we're vaguely aware of some of these. hopefully, when we reach out to OCF they'll be able to hand us off to one of them or something like that--but obviously, it's a good idea to have a backup plan, and you don't just want to have the single basket of eggs after the rug gets pulled out from under you like this
Don't know anything about this kind of thing, but I found this post: https://lemmy.world/post/12531572.
Since OCE accepted lemmy.world, they'll probably accept you too. I checked OCE's main website and found this list of other affiliated funds: https://opencollective.com/search?isHost=true.
I would think OCE wants members to be in the EU - currently none of us are. I'd have to look into it.
Source
Hi, Feddit.uk Admin here. We just launched our fundraising at Open Collective, so the on-boarding meeting is fresh in my mind and our fiscal host said that we could always go with Open Collective EU as he pay for our hosting in Euros. So I reckon they can be pretty flexible with this kind of thing. You'll have EU users and probably get some donations in Euros, which should be easy enough to get your foot in the door there, assuming they have any regional requirements.
Anyway, sorry to hear about all the mess, having just set it all up I can imagine the hassle it would be to start over again but I am confident you can find another fiscal host on Open Collective and it should then be a fairly seamless switch over (at least as far as the general users are concerned). Good luck.