New Bedford Guide Your Guide to New Bedford and South Coast, MA
In Massachusetts, you can start a non-profit with a board that is 100% women and/or designated minority members, but the board can’t be more than 49% white male.
For nearly a decade, my brother and I have helped thousands of cats and dogs return home. With the help of our followers, I used the New Bedford Guide and New Bedford Pet Detective Facebook pages to reunite missing pets with their owners. I feel we’ve done a lot of good for the community and decided to look into starting a non-profit to raise funds to boost the posts on Facebook and potentially add a paid person to assist. We’ve never taken a penny and have dedicated countless of hours to the cause.
After two minutes of research and to my surprise, white males can’t be the majority of a new non-profit in Massachusetts. To start a non-profit, we’d have to give up complete control of the cause to other people because we are white men.
On the official Commonwealth of Massachusetts Non-Profit page, it states the following requirements:
Massachusetts defines a qualifying minority group as:
– American Indian or Native American
– Asian
– Black
– Eskimo
– Hispanic
This means women of any ethnicity can be 100% of a non-profit board in Massachusetts, but if you are a man, you must be Native American Indian, Asian, black, Eskimo, or Hispanic to be the majority of a board. Again, to be clear, if you are a white male that wants to start a non-profit in Massachusetts, you’ll need to recruit women or qualified minorities to control it.
One has to ask, what if Massachusetts decided men of any ethnicity could control a non-profit board, but black women could not make up 50% or more of a board and would need to recruit white men to start it? You’d correctly be outraged. But this is Massachusetts, where you can discriminate based on race and sex, as long as it’s white males who are the target.
Is this a new regulation? How long has this regulation been in effect?
Expand the board! And spent the time thinking about how we historically got to this point. I would gladly serve in a board like this and you have my immense respect for the work you do! It’s unfortunate for situations like this, just like it’s unfortunate when women don’t have equal pay and when black men fear for their lives during traffic stops.
Diversity is good. I hope you find a way, and that I can support the cause.
this refers only to certification as a diverse organization. proving your non profit is a diverse organization is not the same as organizing a non profit.
I think these are just the requirements for being certified as a diverse nonprofit by the Supplier Diversity Office, not for being a nonprofit itself.
So it’s OK for white men to discriminate against people of color and ethnic background and discriminate, control and make personal choices for ALL women regardless of color, religion or ethnic background? Now you see it as discrimination?
Agree with recent posts. From a closer read, the way it looks to me, the 51% women/minority thing for nonprofits refers to nonprofits supplying goods and services to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
If you are one of those women/minority 51% or more nonprofits, you get some preferential treatment doing business with the State.
I can’t see the “New Bedford Pet Detective” nonprofit doing business with the State, unless I dunno maybe the Governor’s dog gets loose or something.
So as far as I can tell, you can create a nonprofit “New Bedford Pet Detective” and the nonprofit Board can have any mix of men, women, minorities and non-minorities on the Board just fine.
Not a lawyer not an accountant the usual disclaimers, but that’s my take on the matter. Don’t give up on your nonprofit dream, I think respectfully your worry might be misplaced. You will need legal/accounting help to set up the nonprofit, so they can give you better advice.
Now, all that being said, there is definitely a problem with the women/minority thing with nonprofits getting preferential treatment doing business with government entities.
DBE = “Disadvantaged Business Enterprise” a business with majority women/minority control.
Look at Philadelphia. As it turns out just today (April 12) an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. “Philly, Fraud, and ‘Equity’ Gone Wrong”.
A PennDOT painting contract, a DBE simply bought paint from Sherwin-Williams and created false receipts…..for a fee…..to present to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Sherwyn-Williams paid a million dollar fine to settle without admitting guilt.
The DBE system raises the cost of construction, creates an ecosystem of make-work for certification and oversight, and provides easy pickings for scofflaws. All to no benefit for a real women/minority business.
There was another flap in Boston, revolving around Walsh Construction and Melo’s Rodbusters, a certified DBE (in South Dartmouth I believe?)
“DBE fraud is pervasive” says a 2020 article in the Journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
All this is out of the WSJ editorial today.
I don’t think this is fair
Everyone needs to stop driving dividing lines between people for characteristics that they can’t control. Isn’t this the textbook definition of racism? ? If people are trying to provide services that will benefit the state of Massachusetts it shouldn’t matter what sex, race or skin color you are. But that’s how they make more and more money! Dividing us and making people fight and arguewith one another!
More Anti-White race hate. The system only punishes one racial category.