[Foundation-l] Tax status in the Netherlands for the Foundation

[James D. Forrester]

On Friday, March 25, 2005 08:42 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:

> At this moment I am researching setting up a Dutch chapter.

[Snip]

> Please give me feedback, is this something that we want. Is this
> something also possible in other European countries ??

Yes, I think that having chapters in countries in the EU is worthwhile for
two reasons - firstly, it helps with donations by providing a tax-relieved
method of donating (at least, in some countries), and secondly, it helps
foster a sense of community and belonging in the members.

Currently just France and Germany have chapters set up, but we are looking
at setting one up for the UK soon-ish. Eventually we may want to form a
Wikimedia Europe organisation to liase and so on at a larger level, but for
now this will suffice.

One this that you may want to look out for is what exactly you can do whilst
retaining the special tax status - for example, a UK chapter will not be
able to merely blindly collect money for the main Foundation, but instead
have charitable aims in and of itself (which might in practice not make a
great deal of difference, of course - collecting money for international
Internet-based education and learning projects vs. collecting money for the
Wikimedia Foundation).

Of course, you will need to have a quite large group of people willing and
able to put in the amount of work required to run the chapter, which I
imagine is not entirely simple (especially if none of you have done this
sort of thing before), and are able to stick with the chapter through the
longer term.

Very best of luck.

Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

Mail: james at jdforrester.org | jon at eh.org | csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk
IM  : (MSN) jamesdforrester at hotmail.com