Advice for a team that has lost its school

[z_beeblebrox]

Some answers to previous posts:

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

Do you need a place to work? Or do you just need an affiliated school to receive funds?

Considering how much time you have, I would suggest finding another school you can work at or with for 2013. After that, I suggest becoming your own non-profit.

We do not currently have a build space, although there are several possibilities we are considering. However, we didn't build at our school last year, so the biggest thing we lose from leaving the school is tax credit donations (about $5000 last year).

Originally Posted by kiasam111

I'm not sure if this is a problem for you, but one of the things that we do to always ensure that we are sustainable is we take in students from any school. We have people who are willing to drive over an hour just to get to our meetings, even during off-season. We also are based at our local university (college), and many of our students have ended up going to that university to study an engineering related degree. This is quite desirable for the university, as it firstly gives them more students and it gives them outreach opportunities through new means.

If it helps, our workshop for the last 3 years has been smaller than 2 pits, so whatever you have, you guys can build a robot =)

Good luck, and I hope that helps.

It is very likely that we will accept students from any school.

Originally Posted by vhcook

There is a third option - find another non-profit to be affiliated with. I know in our area there are a few 4H-linked teams, which helps with the insurance issues.

Good luck.

It has been suggested that we merge with a local science-education organization who donated build space last year.

Originally Posted by MrTechCenter

I assume you mean that your school will no longer give you funds. If you still have a teacher mentor and a working space, you can become your own non-profit organization and get local companies to sponsor you. This is how our team works because we've never gotten any funding from our school, we are allowed to use our school's shop though, because the shop teacher is our head mentor. If you have lost your shop as well, see if you can get a local company to sponsor you by letting you use their shop. I know this is how a lot of teams have to work.

Our school has never given us money directly, although it allowed us to make several thousand dollars in tax-credit donations. We do have a local company donating laser-cut aluminium, but I will look into businesses that may donate build space.

Thanks for all the ideas!!