Annual Meeting Sunday, May 22nd, 2022 @ 2:00 PM
Old Town Hall, Great Hall
By-Laws! By-Laws! By-Laws!
Letter to Our Members from Tom Kinzer, President
Please read the following post before reading the Proposed By-Laws linked below
Are you suffering from insomnia? Looking for a topic that will bore you silly and put you to sleep? Well, you could download all 800+ pages of the Structured Generalized Markup Language (SGML) standard and try to read it. This will cure most cases of insomnia. Or closer to home, you could read your Society’s official By-Laws. Yes, they do exist, and for most members of the Historical Society, the most likely reaction to their existence is, “Yawn!” So why is a committee of the Board of Directors re-writing them? Why do we need them, anyway? What’s the matter with the ones we’ve got, especially given that almost nobody reads them? This article is my attempt to answer, informally at least, some of these questions. It’s not a legal treatise on corporate law.
For starters, By-Laws are an integral part of being a corporation, in our case a non-profit corporation. Being a non-profit corporation allows us to put “Inc.” after our name, and that, in turn, allows us to become a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Each of these things, and they are quite different, represents a status that is well worth having and protecting. Let’s begin at the beginning.
Continue reading “By-Law Changes Up for a Vote”
