Organizing Side Groups Financially

[Ogehsim]

Our team has been working on revamping our hierarchy, both for students and adults. A project myself and a fellow alum have been working on is an Alumni Association for the purpose of sustaining a team history, preserving accumulated knowledge, and providing some insights into the college and job searches.

We thought it would be nice in order for the Association to be able to handle money on our own - able to fundraise a bit, to support our own activities (reunion picnics, etc.) and possibly to help the team.

Becoming a 501(c)3 seems far in excess of what we want to do, and we haven't had much luck finding clear rules on becoming a booster club in our school district, but we would like to be independent of the high school anyway if we could help it.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a way to financially structure this group? As a college student, I'm still working on "personal savings account" and "debit card", so if there's an easy simple option out there (can we just set up a straight account under the name Fairport Alumni Association? what kind of account?) I don't know it.

Any sort of advice would be greatly appreciated. We would like to not have to use team funds to pay for our events, nor want to hussle alumni for donations every time we want to do something.

tl;dr: We just want a way to be financially independent from our team and be able to handle our own funds, without one person just collecting donations independently and redistributing them each time we want to do something.

Thanks!