Bylaws Be Bygones

Hey guys,

Thanks for joining us on this mission. I'm Crisee, one of the co-founders of Roscoe Rescues, a business in animal rescue organized in the state of Tennessee in September of 2019. Since then, we have been working on filling out a 1023 form for the IRS, which will allow us to have 501(c)3 status and be an official non profit organization. Together, myself and my co-founders and good friends, Amy & Jaimie have set out on a mission, a mission to change the face of rescue.

Most people who think of rescue animals think of a shelter, a shelter with concrete floors, tall cages and lots of barking dogs. They think of a mutt, perhaps a pitty mix or a lab mix, or a chihuahua mix. Either way, they think of a mutt in distress, a sad animal with a sad life who they just want to help. This is a reality for millions of animals. However, it isn't for all of them. More can be done. I've always thought this to myself. More can be done for these dogs and cats who are left homeless, someone just has to do it. In what I can only call serendipity, me, Jaimie and Amy all worked together at an overpriced bar on Broadway, slinging drinks. None of us stayed at the bar long, just long enough to meet each other and realize, we were the people who were meant to do more. We are going to change the face of rescue.

Thus far this journey has been tedious, not hard or over our heads, but tedious for sure. The 1023 was mailed to us for free directly from the IRS. The twenty page packet arrived to us in the mail shortly after we asked for it... along with a 50 page instruction booklet. The packet isn't too detailed and is easily laid out, but when you start coming across sentences that might as well be in Mandarin you have to refer to the instruction booklet. Which, thank the freaking lord for! 'Instructions to the 1023 for Dummies' breaks down each and every sentence, option, and all the definitions in between. Without it, we'd have to hire someone to do our paperwork for suuuuure.

So here we are now. We've been working on the 1023 packet for months now, and we are finally wrapping it up. Currently we only meet once a week, at the moment its Friday nights and we spend about 2-3 hours each meeting working on it, and we have been slowly chipping away at it. At our first RR meeting of the new year we began to adopt our Bylaws, also known as, the bane of our existence. Bylaws are rules set in place by an organization to allow the Board to function properly. We had to explain who we are, chose our roles in the organization, what those roles meant, what roles other people have, what they meant, and what to do in between all that with everything. We spent hours reading over bylaws of other organizations and Googling ideas and definitions behind all the legal jargon. Like what was our definition of a quorum, what would we do if the quorum wasn't complete? What would we require a quorum to be there for, and why? Seven looooong weeks later our bylaws are barely three pages long but I could write a novel on the work we put into them all. I cannot express how ready we all are to be 100% done writing them.

This week we completed our conflict of interest policy in one go, which felt great! We are one step closer to achieving our status. Next week we hope to tie up any loose ends, put the finishing touches on our bylaws and get ready to shell out a bunch of cash to file our paperwork. Fingers crossed that in a few weeks we'll hear back from the IRS and officially be a Non Profit organization.

Stay with us to see what happens next. Changing the world, one day at a time.

-Crisee

#community #team