*General executive committee meeting on October 3rd confirmed these following official mission/vision/core value statement.
Mission Statement
Purposeful Pennies contributes to organizational efforts aimed at providing education to underprivileged children. Purposeful Pennies will achieve this mission through collecting donations in the form of loose change (pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters). This fund will be used to contribute to specific initiatives being undertaken by nonprofit organizations in the field of education for the underprivileged children.
Vision Statement
The vision of Purposeful Pennies is to demonstrate that even a small contribution can bring a big positive result.
Core Values
- Small steps can bring about big change
- Pennies as metaphors for people associated with Purposeful Pennies
* Special thanks to Khurram and Alla for writing draft and revising it.
On Friday October9, President (Jonathan), Vice-president (Khurram), and Business manager and director (Aya) had a small meeting for discussing the idea of registering Purposeful Pennies as a Pitt student organization. The Student Organization Resource Center (SORC) at the University of Pittsburgh provides a administrative service for student organization. Until now, the SORC certifies over 400 student organizations to officially operate and provides information and resources.
http://www.sorc.pitt.edu/
The benefits and intentions of SORC certified organizations fit our needs.
First, it provides a formal organizational form that gave our group credibility and transparency. Second, it offers bank account and Pitt web acount which will help us initiate formal fundraising event outside the campus. We can also create our own webpage. Third, it helps us be freed from the complicated legal adminitration process of registering for 501C(3) organization. In other words, we can work in a more flexible way under the certification of University of Pittsburgh. Fourth, we will be freed from the funding support issues and do our activities independently. We do not want to get an official funding from outside for administration cost or any other reaons. GSPIA student organization certification is mainly aiming at providing financial funding, whereas SORC student organization is mainly focused on providing services for establishing official credibility and certification. This is the reason we want the SORC student organization form instead of GSPIA student organization form.
On Tuesday, October 13, President (Jonathan) and Vice-president (Khurram) had a meeting with Dr. Kearns to ask him take charge of the full-time faculty advisor position for PPs. He gladly accepted our suggestion. Once PPs official executive committee meeting confirms this idea of SORC certified student organization form on Saturday November 7, we will officially request his signature for the SORC certified student organization application form.
1.Going over items on the agenda: sharing ideas, suggestions
oEveryone agreed that our name should be Purposeful Pennies (PPs would be the acronym)
2.Khuram’s ideas:
-Vision is usually more general, identifies general direction – what is our overarching goal
-Mission – operationalize your vision – how will you achieve your vision (our overarching goal)
-Need to decide on how specific our mission
-Need to formulate vision
More specified mission
3.Annual plans
-Our specific initiatives – what exactly are we planning to do to achieve our mission (specific projects)
-What are we envisioningin terms of our annual plan: we can do 3 initiatives per year – 4 months for each initiatives
-Maybe we will do 2 initiatives per year for now
-Might make a final decision on in December
-Kekenya project – education related
-Is education is the filed for us then – do all of our projects have to fall into the realm of education? Seems that we agree that it’s the main purpose of the group should be related to the education for the youth
-Another crucial component of our mission is that we want to help children
odefine children (up to 15 years old)
-Specific amount of money should not be a part of the mission statement – we are committing ourselves up to 1000 per initiative.
Mission: children and education – key components
Based on the discussion:
Mission Statement
Purposeful Pennies contributes to organizational efforts aimed at providing education to underprivileged children.Purposeful Pennies will achieve this mission through collecting donations in the form of lose change (pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters).These funds will be used to contribute to specific initiatives being undertaken by nonprofit organizations of repute in the field of education for the underprivileged youth.
Vision Statement
The vision of Purposeful Pennies is to demonstrate that even a small contribution can bring a big positive result.
Core Values
-Small steps can bring about big change
-Pennies as metaphors for people associated with Purposeful Pennies
4.Legal issue concerns
-When we start fundraising money – raises issue of how the donations are kept – if in personal account -might raise the issue of transparency and accountability
-Good governance requires organization’s bank account
-Who are we – a social initiative or incorporated organization – goal to decide by December
-we can still proceed with smaller fundraising initiatives
-Whatever we end up deciding, still need to create organization form (that we will use with our partner organizations) – Jonathan will look into it
5.For the next meeting
-Aya will approach Kekenya – and we will decide if we will go with this initiative
-Khuram – will start drafting action plan
-Khuram and Jonathan will go to PNC and find out whether we can open a free checking accout for our organization
-Jonathan will find out if we can register our organization through Pitt
-Alla will prepare the logo
6.Ideas for the future
-Counting collected coins procedure could be used as a social event for all the members to get together and to recruit new members – social function – celebrating and advertising our purpose
-Issue of privacy –
oOn our record sheet we will just record the money collected per month and the names of contributors
oWe will keep our contributors anonymous for the sake of privacy
oWe will not record how much a given individual contributed – instead we will record a total number of donations per month
oWe will then post on our blog the amount of collected donations and names of the people who contributed
othank you e-mails will be sent to our contributors
-down the road we might consider publishing a monthly newsletter reporting our progress
