Starting to build our first board and it feels like getting the band together

This morning I had a meeting regarding the status of our incorporation as a non-profit organization and am happy to report that things are on pace for this to become official within the next couple of months. Yay!

I've talked about the importance of being a legal entity before (like here), and I want to emphasize some of those points again. The mission of Conference2Classroom is to create a pathway between experts attending conferences across Canada and local classrooms in the host city. While this is a simple idea there is a lot of time, energy and costs that go into it. As a new initiative, we need to get our name out, promote our mission and advertise to attract users. We need to have funding to mobilize our participating experts to our participating classrooms, and as we are particularly keen on addressing accessibility issues for communities that may not typically have this kind of service available (like rural communities) sometimes that means the costs of mobilizing is higher. And then there are operational costs (like those associated with running this website).

Incorporating as a nonprofit is important because it will give us access to funding we need to support our mission.

Part of the incorporation process involves identifying your initial board members. I am fortunate over the years to have become friends with an amazing group of individuals, and this list of amazing friends has grown each year. After my meeting this morning, I contacted a few friends who have encouraged and supported me as I have worked to build Conference2Classroom to invite them to act on my first board. I am trying to build a board that represents the types of users I would have, I think that we will make better decisions if we have a teacher and if we have an expert who has participated in an activity with us and if we have somebody who has experience in the nonprofit sector. Asking friends for a favour is always risky business, but I am hopeful to see favourable responses and looking forward to their thoughts and contributions. I can't wait to get things settled, to be able to announce our first board and introduce this amazing group of people, people I am proud to call my friends, to you.

​I am filled with the same excitement in building my first board as I can only imagine getting a band together must be!