Setting up a Community Center for Teens is a wonderful undertaking that deserves all of our gratitude and support. The first thing to do is boring but critical and that is establishing the infrastructure for your future community center. The worst thing you can do is set up a center and worry about infrastructure later. Since the Center should be a nonprofit agency, I will focus on that. Here are some of the critical infrastructure steps: 1. Decide who is going to be on the board of directors for your nonprofit. Most state laws law require one to three directors. Practically, however, for attracting funding, you should have five or seven. 2. Set up and incorporate (articles of incorporation) the nonprofit that will run the facility. While this is somewhat easy, the forms on file with each Secretary of State will not pass muster with the IRS so you have to make sure that special tax clauses are included. 3. If you are going to own the facility (i.e. have equity in the real estate), then a separate corporation should own the property and the nonprofit serves as manager/operator. 5. Bylaws for the nonprofit have to conform with certain IRS requirements for tax exemption purposes. 6. After that, the nonprofit must register with Dun & Bradstreet . 7. After that, the nonprofit must register with Central Contract Registration. 8. After that, the nonprofit must register with grants.gov. 9. After that, you need to have a nonprofit board of directors retreat for about one day in order to chart a clear and appropriate strategic plan based upon clear SWOT analysis. 10. Investigate zoning requirements for the community where you want to set this up. That's a start. Tell us how it goes... Good luck. José A. Rivera, JD President & CEO Rivera, Sierra & Company, Inc. Consultants to Small Business and Nonprofits jrivera@riverasierra.com

The first thing you will need to do is create a business plan. Then, you can use it to approach other organizations that might be interested in helping you get started, either as partners, funders or both. These might include churches, private schools, foundations, and others.

ShodCross, You may want to check our Loans and Grant Search tool and see if you qualify for anything. You may also want to check in with the state of Michigan for any state grants they might have to help. Last, another idea would be to get the community involved. I am not sure if there are businesses that would be will to contribute to help this cause that are located in Grand Rapids. Sometimes if you can have it hit home people are will to help. JimD