[1]

“We are pleased to inform you that upon review of your application for tax exempt status we have determined that you are exempt from Federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.”  Those words sent me to tears again upon reading them.  I had already cried when my husband called from the Post Office to tell me the good news.  The rest of the day I kept getting teary-eyed just thinking about it.  It’s amazing to have an idea and follow through with it all the way  to have such an acknowledgement from the US government.

The effective date of the exemption is retroactive to April 7, 2009 when we incorporated as a nonprofit!  That means that this whole time, we have been operating as a  legal public charity.  To that I had to say a “yee-haw” because I’m a Texan, a “yippee” because I’m a kid at heart, and a “hallelujah” because I’m a Christian.  Can you tell how happy I am about this?  This is my first  attempt to form a nonprofit, although I have created a for-profit company previously.  I’m sharing this news with you, so that you can trust us, but also to inspire you to go after your ideas even if you don’t have precisely that past experience on your resume.

Moreover, I had never developed a Web site, blogged or tweeted before starting this nonprofit.  Now we have an 19-page [2] Web site, around 100 followers on our blog, and 255 followers on our [3] twitter account.  Last year, I made a career change to focus on online work.  I enrolled in university courses for teaching online classes. I volunteered to design and teach an online course for my professional organization, TESOL.  I participated in several free online training courses that were offered for by Microsoft, the Small Business Administration (SBA), and US Government to name a few.  See our Web page, Free Online Services, to learn how to train yourself: [4] http://brokebutnotforlong.org/4.html.

Now with our tax exempt status, we can apply for federal grants and other private funding.  We are also able to receive “bequests, devises, transfers or gifts under…the Code.”  As mentioned in our blog page, “[5] Please Donate,” our number one priority is to provide persons with disabilities the adaptive technology to access our site.  In our donation letter, we specifically outline that we would like to add closed captioning (cc) to our educational videos.  This entails purchasing the rights to the commercial videos which currently are “unbranded” on  our Web site.  Unbranded means the non-commercial ones available on YouTube.com.

As always, I will keep you posted on our efforts.  Thank you again for your readership.  I have been working on a few other areas but will save that information for a separate blog.  I also hope to get my husband, Mark,  to write another blog.  In addition, I would love to hear more from you.  We received our first fan email. It was a nice surprise!  It was from a teacher who used our Web page, “[6] Resources for Workers with Disabilities,” for a research project.  I was pleased to see my efforts to provide reliable resources on the Web site utilized in such a way.  She also recommended a site to add to the page, and I did so with acknowledgement to her.  It says (reader recommended).  I aim to provide a employment social network, as is our slogan, so I appreciate and will use your input!

Sandra Annette Rogers,

The Broke Blog

[7] sandra@brokebutnotforlong.org

Look for jobs: [8] http://www.indeed.com/p/index.php?pid=7080813311402333