I am not advocating giving club money to a charity - any charity. I would advocate against doing so.
I think the proposal to reimburse a member for his/her cost of attending a training course violates the IRS rules prohibiting using a 501(c) sanctioned organizations funds for the benefit of a single member. It does not matter that it is random or that the person is identified after the fact. In fact. the random nature "pulling a name out of a hat" smacks of a form of gambling - akin to a form of lotto. What not simply select a member of the club and give them the money - that would be nice, would give back to the member?
A legitimate form of club sponsored safety training would be to defray the costs of a MSF course in the various states and let members attend without discrimination or preselection. Another would be to sponsor a track day - once again open to the members generally with riding instructors, etc. to teach safe riding skills.
My apologies to all for raising these points now - I should have raised them at the February meeting - I did not know this idea was going to be discussed at that meeting. I think I was in class so I would not been able to attend but at least I would have submitted electronic comments or PMed Tina for example.
What's next - reimburse people for winning rallies to promte touring? Reimburse the "winner" of a pool of names of people who bought JVB's maintenance DVD to promote maintenance?
Not only is the idea to reimburse these types of expenses in this manner a bad use of funds, it is arguably illegal (in terms of violating the IRS rules).
Steve
BMWGirl wrote:The safety course thing was discussed at the February meeting in Timonium. There is the ARC (I THINK is the name) that is putting together a special safety class with special rates for BMWBMW club members. Our goal is that people sign up, take the class and then at the end of the class - everyone throws their name in the hat and we draw a name. The winner will be reimbursed their class registration by the club. So it's not a particular person, it's a "Winner".
We are trying to give back to the club. We can't give something to every single person because every single person is different. We are trying to help out members in a variety of ways. We get a lot of attendence at the Rally so we tried a band this year - that was a nice treat; We bought a GS911 because our tech days are so incredibly popular that we wanted to help out members; Some people believe in safety training, so we came up with this idea to help with training.
You can't make 450 people happy at the same time, so we're trying to touch on something different and trying to reach out to more and more members.
How does giving OUR CLUB dues to the Avon society benefit our club? Why is giving back to OUR CLUB MEMBERS a bad thing but giving to a charity is okay? I don't get it???