RPG Research Now Officially Incorporated as a Non-Profit

by Hawke Robinson — published 2017/10/04 18:30:00 GMT-7, last modified 2022-11-12T08:26:11-08:00

After 13+ years operating as a non-entity group of volunteers. Today we received our certificate of incorporation of RPG Research as a Washington State Non-profit.

It has been a long road getting from there to here.

Beginning in the 1970s, I first began with RPGs.

Then I created and ran RPG education courses 5 days a week at Realms of Inquiry, "A school for gifted & talented children", around 1985.

Then fast forward to creating the research repository website and developing therapeutic RPG programs starting in 2004 as "The RPG Research Project", Initially with just myself as the core person, but thankfully with periodic invaluable help from various other volunteers project-by-project, thought no core consistent team outside of myself.

In September of 2016, after years of research, I bought (out of pocket) the Wheelchair Friendly RPG Trailer prototype, and then things took off!

By January of 2017 I had a second core team member, John Welker on board.

By September 2017 we (now "we", instead of just "I", yay!) have 6 core team members, plus around 20+ various volunteers (and counting).

We have also been growing our regular programs and various relationships with organizations like the Muscular Dystrophy Association, Spark Central, PAVE, WSTRA, EWU, NEYC, and many others.

Now, October 2017, RPG Research is officially a Washington state Non-Profit Incorporation.I paid for this also out of pocket, in the hopes that fairly soon RPG Research will start to get donors to become more self-sufficient, and be able to grow beyond my means being the bottleneck.

It will be a while before we can afford to apply for 501(c)3 status, probably not until some time in 2018.

It will all depend on how donations go through our Patreon monthly membership program at http://patreon.com/rpgresearch.

Tomorrow we are setting the Wheelchair Friendly RPG Trailer Prototype at Fan Nexus in the Spokane Convention Center, downtown. Fan Nexus has kindly provided us (without charge) with a generous 60+ x 10+ "vendor" space.

We are there for people interested in learning more about RPG Research, the RPG Trailer & Bus, tours of the RPG trailer, Q&A, presentations, brochures (just printed up 250 updated trifolds), business cards (1,000), and game sessions inside the trailer (see the schedule here: http://www2.rpgresearch.com/blog/at-fan-nexus-2017).

All of this is still out of my own pocket so far, but hopefully soon the number of supporters will ramp up now that there is an actual incorporated (non-profit) entity, rather than a loose group of well-meaning volunteers?

We're steadily working on cleaning up and fixing the Wheelchair Accessible RPG Bus, which should hopefully be ready for prime time sometime in 2018 as well.

Many thanks to the invaluable help from all the volunteers, and especially all the hard work and dedication of the core volunteer team members: