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.
As I'm not too familiar with the US financial system, allow me a potentially ignorant question: in the case of Beehaw specifically, would it make a big difference if the recipient did not qualify for whatever 501(c)(3) represents (presumably a tax-exempt charity of some sort)?
I.e. would it make things much more complicated or impose disproportionately high taxes if one of the admins received the money directly?
I appreciate that OCF adds a public audit layer that makes sense in many cases, but you seem like a trustworthy bunch and direct donations would work for me (though I obviously can't speak for anyone else).
Either way, thank you so much for everything you do.
It would be the difference between paying no taxes to either a) paying taxes on all funds received at regular income tax rates without the benefit of deduction of expenses or b) doing 99% of the work to still need to pay income taxes on net income (revenues less expenses). So if you're going to do the work, it's worthwhile to do the additional 1% to get all of the benefits.
We will be reaching out to OCF for clarifications based on whatever potential solutions we come up with