I hope everyone is having a fine Saturday. Been thinking about starting a non profit company. I have been in contact with some houston park project admins fixing up my local park. Its needs a lot of work and I'm taking a stand to let my voice be heard. They are planning on connecting Higway 90 through it and I'm about ready to really start pushing to clean the entire place up while they are putting up this highway extenion. I figure thats the least they can do is take care of what they aren't cutting through. Anyone have any good places I can search for more info on the subject?
Some friends of mine and I started one in college. It's called "Education equals Making Community Connections" or E=MC^2 Will post more later. Short of it is you need to get the registration papers from the state, get them filled out and such, make some bylaws, ideally have a lawyer look over it all, and pay some money to file it all.
You probably want a 501 C . Here is the easy way for a fee : http://www.legalfilings.com/index.html?taxexempt You can get the forms yourself from the dept. of treasury. You also need to draft bylaws, have elections and meetings and keep minutes, get a bank account, and so on. The easy way is really a pretty good option.
Once you gain status, check out techsoup.com, you get all kinds of software for like $5. It's a steal.