Hi all, On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 12:00:40PM +0100, Philip Hands wrote: > On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 01:57:54 -0400, Richard Darst <[email protected]> wrote: > ... > > Some of us would just like to make a donation, additional sponsorship, > > or donate some of our travel sponsorship in order to fund Clint's > > travel. > > While, as you know, I'm all for this situation being sorted out, I > have doubts that it's OK to earmark money for an individual's benefit, > and still put it through the not-for-profit -- at least I'm pretty > certain that doing that would cause problems for a UK Charity.
I don't want to comment too much in this thread, because Clint and I are currently both candidates for SPI board (please read about all 4 candidates and vote!), and anything I say here about his case specifically could be interpreted as trying to influence that election, which is of course not my intention. I shouldn't personally coordinate the solution in Clint's case for the same reason. There are two things I should say: 1) Anyone who wants to contribute to Clint's travel costs is more than welcome to. It's great that Richard is volunteering to track that, and certainly coordination by him as a DebConf organizer who wants to fix the situation will help ensure a good result. Doing this under the aegis of DebConf is 100% fine from my perspective. 2) As Phil suspects, it would cause problems for SPI to be the conduit of those payments. No US 501(c)(3) charity can accept donations specifically earmarked by the donor for the private benefit of a specific individual. I have no ill will toward Clint and am only pointing this out because as an SPI board member I'm required to try to keep SPI out of tax trouble. I'm sure someone can figure out an alternate way to track or aggregate the donations. If nothing else it could simply be gathering cash, US checks, or future money transfer pledges at DebConf and working with Richard to make sure the money is tracked and gets to Clint. - Jimmy Kaplowitz [email protected] _______________________________________________ Debconf-team mailing list [email protected] http://lists.debconf.org/mailman/listinfo/debconf-team
