End of 2022: Recapping An Eventful Year
Our blog has been a little quiet lately as we have all been doing our best to keep up with what has been a very busy last few months for our clients. To commemorate our first full year as a firm, and a year where we added several new members and many great nonprofits as clients, we want to take a quick look back at some of our posts and resources from the past year.
Our Favorite Posts and Resources From 2022:
PRIs, MRIs, and UBIT: OK, so this one is a cheat, because it was from 2021. In fact, it was our very first substantive post. But I’m counting it here because it is perhaps the post I shared most with clients in 2022 as I think it does a decent job breaking down the impact investment part of our work. And it has a chart that makes very little sense to most people but that I continue to share with people and try to draw during live presentations anyway.
For-Profit and Non-Profit Affiliates. From the beginning of 2022, this launched our MLC Resources page (it needs some love and attention but it’s coming along well). This resource captures one of our most frequently discussed topics with clients and potential clients: for-profit and non-profit affiliates — when it is OK, when it is not OK, and how to make them work.
A Guide to Nonprofit Corporate Structuring: Our second resource, this series of charts is intended to break out the different roles of the nonprofit corporate governance structure: directors, officers, and (sometimes) members. It also gets into different ways to play with the structure to accomplish different goals, whether empowering the Board, or retaining founder control, or creating a democratic structure for members of the public or (as in the case of our nonprofit affiliate, MLC Collective) empowering employees. Some of the charts here are overcomplicated, but there are a couple here that I think are good explainers for how nonprofit governance can work.
Gifts of Cryptocurrency: I would be glad to never speak about cryptocurrency again, but I did talk about it a lot last year and had fun with it than I did. And, it is a good excuse to recap some of the basics of charitable giving and the different tax rules that apply. Also, I need to acknowledge at least one of the many enjoyable talks with Alan Gassman over the past year for CPAAcademy — very grateful to Alan and his audience for all of their time listening to my nonsense.
The End of Roe and the Relationship Between Nonprofits and the Law: Hardly a highlight, considering that the end of Roe vs. Wade is one of the most devastating legal developments of my lifetime. There are now 13 US states that force people to give birth against their will. But I think the sentiments post remain relevant, as we all (and especially lawyers) try to reckon with how we relate to the law when the law is so often the source of injustice, and the role of nonprofits in resisting that injustice.
Political Advocacy by Public Charities: On a related note, charities need to engage in political advocacy as part of that resistance, and my absolute favorite contribution to the blog came from Charli Cleland. I would love for more of our posts to be as creative and clever as this, and there really is a ton of great information in there for nonprofits looking to learn more about how they can get involved within the legal limits.
Labor Day Post: I took this Labor Day to proselytize about the value of organized labor, some important developments, and how progressive nonprofits have an ethical responsibility to take employee and labor rights more seriously than they sometimes do. Something close to my heart personally and the sort of writing I’d like to do more of in the next year.
A Modest Proposal for Billionaires to Give Us Their Company: This post was where I recapped a couple billionaire gifts to 501(c)(4)’s, the power of 501(c)(4)’s as potential “superfoundations”, and not a small amount of concern about the policy and state of our democracy. The framing was a not-at-all-ironic pitch for billionaires to use our nonprofit affiliate, MLC Collective, as a home for their 501(c)(4) philanthropy. This was my favorite to write, even if it is the one that I’m most would have been cut if this blog had an editor or if I had better business judgment.
Risk-Spotting for Fiscal Sponsors: Not really a blog post, but a link to the slides from one of my year’s highlights — doing a joint presentation with Ehsan Ali of MLC and Jinna Kwak of Adler & Colvin for the National Network of Fiscal Sponsors in San Diego. I think there is a lot of good stuff in here for fiscal sponsors to think about and fiscal sponsorship has been a huge part of our practice over the past year — and one that we hope to continue to grow in the next year.
I’ll follow up with another post about our goals for next year, but I know that one of them will be to continue to build on these posts and resources and try to create a valuable resource for the nonprofit sector.
