Cohousing-L Mailing List: Paying babysitters- the legalities

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

Having survived the scary potential of one hair-raising 
potential-liability-suit situation, at RoseWind we are very careful about 
"employees." 

As a community, we have a stated value on supporting young children and 
their families, and nobody objects to the community as a whole paying 
sitters for meetings. But our accountant says we are opening ourselves to 
liability if our annual budget has a line item that says "childcare 
$400", or if an investigator could even track down and show that in fact 
RoseWind was really paying a sitter, even if we decide to make it less 
obvious by calling it "children's activities" or decide to give the kid 
team money to steward for sitting somehow. 

We want a system which spreads the cost evenly among the members, and 
which is easy. Passing a hat at meetings does neither, as we don't 
usually carry cash to the common house, and that would also suggest that 
some people would pay and others would not. 

What do others do? 



Lynn Nadeau, RoseWind Cohousing
Port Townsend Washington (Victorian seaport, music, art, nature)
http://www.rosewind.org
http://www.ptguide.com
http://www.ptforpeace.info (very active peace movement here- see our 
photo)

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