How to Start a Not-For Profit



Welcome to the CSCI: How To Start A Not-For-Profit Wiki
If you're interested in starting or running a non-profit organization, this wiki is for you. The emphasis is on Canadian non-profits but relevant to other business structures and countries. We just started working on this in in July 2015, so it is incomplete. Check back for huge updates in the next month, or add your own!

Have You Used a Wiki Before?
We decided to structure this "how to" as a wiki so that you can add more updated / relevant information as you learn. We are using a free platform, so there are random ads which we do not sponsor, sorry! Here are some videos for getting started if you want to edit anything in the wiki, but feel free to just look around.

*Legal Disclaimer*
This is based on our experiences and lessons learned, and those of many others who contributed. Please do not take any of this as legal advice. We have shared different services, websites, products, and businesses that we've used or heard of, but these are not formal endorsements.

'Please don't sue us if you follow any of this advice and it doesn't work out! This is just information sharing, not business or legal advice!'

What is Career Skills Incubator (CSCI)?
We're a small not-for-profit based out of Toronto, ON, Canada. When we started running our organization, there were so many things that popped up along the way and we wished there was someone to tell us, and that it was all in the same place. Nothing existed, so we decided to create one! Because we're not experts, we made it in wiki format so others can build on our experiences.

Career Skills Incubator empowers the un(der)employed to develop skills for their dream careers. We have a mentorship program, run workshops, hold hangouts, create custom volunteer roles, and incubate ideas.

We also developed an open-source mentorship matching tool. You can access the code here: https://github.com/CareersSkillsIncubator/menteer If you don't have the experience in-house, we run a social enterprise where we can customize the code to meet your organization's mentorship program needs.





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