When starting Los Alamos STEAM Lab, we had a real debate about whether we would be a non-profit or LLC. We have a strong desire to serve the community and make our classes accessible to everyone (you can see one part of that desire in our post about diversity). We finally settled on LLC because we weren’t ready to bring a Board into the decision making process. Four women, each with their own strong vision, is plenty to navigate.
HOWEVER, we still very much want to serve the community and that includes folks with diverse incomes. To that end, we’d like to start a STEAM Foundation that will fund scholarships to our classes as well as programming at the libraries and schools of Los Alamos and Northern New Mexico.
In addition to funding activities at our space, we anticipate that the foundation would support other STEAM activities in town, particularly Mathamuseum, another community focused LLC.
If you or anyone you know would be interested in running this foundation (including raising enough money for a decent salary), please get in contact with us. Besides there not being enough hours in a day, we don’t feel it would be ethical to run this ourselves, but we’d be happy to sit on the board. We expect that it would involve about 40 hours a month of grant-writing and schmoozing.
