In 2019, the board of the Reinvestment Alliance made a very important decision. After much deliberation and soul seeking, we decided to incorporate as a not-for-profit in New York State and to file for tax exempt status with the IRS. It was quite an undertaking, and took the better part of the year. We were thrilled to find out at the end of the summer that we had completed the process, and were official a not-for-profit. It was very exciting!
As we went through the process, we learned that we'd need to change the name of our organization. It turns out, you can't use the word "invest" when you're a not-for-profit. Who knew? That's where the soul seeking began.
Who were we? What did we really want to achieve as an organization? We had already outgrown our original initiative, the Reinvest CNY! campaign, and had begun to include many other forms of economic sustainability outside of just investment. Thinking deeply about where we'd come from and what we wanted to achieve allowed us to become the organization we were meant to be, and to select a fitting name: the Sustainable Economies Alliance.
SEA has a vision to connect the people in our community with the information that they need to make sustainably minded financial decisions for themselves, their families, and their organizations and companies. By integrating environmental and social sustainability into these decisions, we will have developed a sustainable economy. We will achieve this through group education and the connections needed for implementation.
This year, SEA will be working with the members of our Alliance, while growing and expanding it, to educate the community on what it means to have a sustainable economy, and what they can do to participate in it. The good news is, we already have one in Central New York.
And in 2020, we're going to tell you all about it.