Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: 501c3 arrangements for cohousing communities

[Pare Gerou (paregerou]

Dear Stephanie,

Greek Village Cohousing is considering a separate but related 501(c)(3) in
order to receive donations for a refugee family home.  There are often
nonprofit support organizations in larger cities you can seek help from
(ie: names like "Center for Nonprofit Excellence,"), and occasionally you
can find a retired person through SCORE (SCORE.org) who will help with
nonprofit designation work.

As for the question of whether there is any element of your community that
"furthers a social cause and provides a public benefit," the question is
whether it is a community public benefit facility  "...that furthers
religious, scientific, charitable, educational, literary, public safety or
cruelty-prevention causes or purposes,"  There are examples of cohousing
communities in places like the UK and Sweden that have event spaces, art
galleries, or other public facing facilities as a community service bridge
to the wider community, and our group likes that idea and has a few dreams
we have not had time to explore.   So if you feel your community has such a
purpose in mind as we do,  we could pool our resources and reach out to one
of the excellent but few attorneys with cohousing expertise with this
question about 501(c)(3) reporting, bylaw, and Board obligations to see if
they are too onerous. I have already started setting up an advisory board
for this and other purposes. Information on eligibility for this
destination is mostly federal tax rather than state law, at least for tax
exemption inquiries, so a few cohousing communities going in together on
this one question is not unrealistic.  I have the contact info. of the
attorneys if you want to contact me.

Unrelatedly, we also looked into the possibility of choosing against an LLC
structure this tax year and becoming a 501(c)(7)- "social and savings club"
which has tax advantages somewhat similar to a (c)(3) but receives dues,
not donations- so tax advantages but no deductions for donors.

-Pare Gerou
Greek Village Cohousing
434.962.7801


On Sat, Apr 23, 2022 at 9:35 AM STEPHANIE FASSNACHT <fassnach [at] ssc.wisc.edu>
wrote:

>  There are some members of our community who would very much like to
> establish a 501c3 non-profit entity so that people can make tax-deductible
> donations.
>
> Are there other co-housing communities that have done this?   If yes &
> you're willing to share the details, that would be great.
>
> Stephanie Fassnacht
> Village Cohousing
> Madison WI
>
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