Ask Community Resource Exchange, Sustainable Economy Laws Center, and MVVN for potential leads.
Project Goals
We’re able to pay staff members equitably!
We have the resources and system needed to do this sustainably
Requirements
Implementation, not just research and design
Alignment with our principles
Work Products
Whether directly created or sourced from other organizations/resources.
Time tracking, payroll, and accounting system
Legal agreements
Insurance
Training
Leads for Consultants Future Incubator
MVVN
Peer Defense Project
Sustainable Economies Law Center
Community Resource Exchange Vega Mala Consulting
Peer Defense Project
The Peer Defense Project Proposal. They’ve also shared that they outsource HR (Gusto), Accounting (Jitasa), and Legal Compliance (Lawyer’s Alliance).
Search “Survey of Financial Experience” in our Shared Google Drive (Keep Private)
Questions we’re currently asking:
What’s your age? What are things about your specific situation that are relevant to an understanding of your financial situation?
What is your current financial situation?
current income, current net worth, access to resources
expenses
How sustainable is your current financial situation? What’s your definition of sustainable? Would you say you have excess, you’re thriving, you’re just making it, or you’re struggling?
What are your philosophies around money?
What do you know about money? What do you need to learn?
How does money influence where you decide to invest your time?
We’re implementing paid staff members at Youth Power Coalition: what ideas do you have about how we do this?
What else do you want to share that you haven’t had an opportunity to share yet?
What, if anything, should we change about these questions?
Share briefly how you intend to use this small grant:*
(A simple bullet list will suffice.) Our question is “How might we make organizing for youth-led collective impact financially accessible?” We’re requesting this grant to put the first part of our support for financial accessibility into place! We will use the grant to hire consultants to guide us through implementing an equitable compensation policy. The project includes: interviewing other youth-led organizations to glean lessons from how they’ve implemented consultation, finalizing compensation policy, purchasing HR software, creating HR employment documents, training organizers on budgeting, redistribution, finances, racialized capitalism, and documentation of the process so we can share it with the wider community and have a base for improving on it in future.
If working with a consultant, please share their contact information: We will be working with MEVVN consulting and Peer Defense Project
Open Collective as a public ledger of all transactions: Youth Power Coalition - Open Collective. Our “collectives” are how we show our different pots of money. I want to move to a system where instead of manual recording, members in our org can be trained as treasurers who then have their own debit cards to make purchases as well as do their own fundraising
Quickbooks as our private ledger/reporting system for needed non-profit compliance like grants and Form 990. We add a link to each Quickbooks transaction that points to that transaction’s public record in Open Collective
Automatic posting of Open Collective reimbursement and expense requests to Slack where the community can vote to approve it via Metagov
Flipcause to accept donations and track our membership/donors but thinking of moving off of it
Gusto for payroll (not yet implemented but our most likely choice
Pain points
Desire to make improvements but need capacity and expertise
Tech platforms are getting hard to manage. Our tech platforms don’t really sync and automation requires maintenance. Metagov has broken multiple times, for example, and we’re using it for only one transaction right now.
Needing to, once systems have improved, train organizers on how to use it.
Not a fan of non-transparent pricing + “paper-based” interactions
First conversation didn’t yield detailed information. Needed to wait on a conversation with another person who is supposed to more knowledgeable about time tracking.