Bike Friendly Kalamazoo believes that great riding clubs make for better riders. That’s why we started our Great Clubs, Great Riders program.
The essence of the program is that BFK wants to help clubs fulfill missions that are aligned with Bike Friendly Kalamazoo’s. Our program is in its inaugural year; although we are making our best attempt to get as close to a “good” program as we can, some fine tuning is inevitable. What’s more, our program is MUCH more complex than programs such as LMB’s, simply due to the sheer number of organization we might be donating to! Please understand if you encounter any bumps along the way, as we go down this (well-intentioned) road together!
Reasonable eligibility requirements apply; they are described on this page. (Do we like having to be so specific and persnickety? Not really, but where money is concerned we really need to be.) Here are the eligibility requirements:
- The program applies to riding (oriented) organizations that are incorporated and have a current (not revoked) 501c3 IRS tax-exempt status. We must be able to verify your status via the Tax Exempt Organization Search facility. Organizations listed as having had their status revoked and not reinstated at the time of our riding event are automatically disqualified. Donations will be made payable to organizations, not individuals.
- If the organization offers family memberships, our program applies to each family member registered to ride in our event, even if our event has a family registration category.
- Riders who register with affiliations that are ambiguous or incomplete or whose membership are not easy to link to a specific organization are excluded. We will not be liable for donations unintentionally applied to the wrong organization or not applied at all. Only one affiliation per rider will be accepted. If more than one eligible affiliation is listed Bike Friendly Kalamazoo will decide which one is eligible at the time.
- We will mail donations to the most recent address that we can find on file by using the IRS’s Tax Exempt Organization Search facility, per the most recent public tax filing or its Determination Letter.
- Written evidence of club affiliation must be received on/by the time of registration for our riding event. Verbal confirmation doesn’t give us sufficient documentation for our purposes. Riders submitting membership affiliations submitted after registration closes are ineligible.
- We believe that amounts of an intended donation to otherwise qualified organizations that are less than $10.00 are not cost-effective for us to administer, thus reducing our ability to carry out our mission more than enabling it. We will attempt to contact an officer of such organizations at least once via email to ask if you would like us to pool such donations and give the sum to another otherwise eligible organization. Upon written confirmation, we will do so, using our own best effort judgement as to how to do so.
- Other than using the US Postal Service when mailing a donation to your eligible organization, our correspondence will by email. We must be able to find a way to contact you by email. You must reply to our emails within 30 days or we will consider the matter closed.
- Bike Friendly Kalamazoo is the sole judge of eligibility; our decisions are final.
- These requirements may change without notice as we fine-tune the program.
All of that language is easy to sum up: your organization has to be street-legal, easy to communicate with, and, its in your interest to turn out in enough force to make our donation have a chance for helping YOU do good!
If you feel your club was eligible for a donation and it has not received our donation within 45 days of a BFK fundraising ride event during which the offer was made:
- It is your obligation to contact BFK in writing at PO Box 22, Portage, MI 49081 or by email using the Contact page at Bike Friendly Kalamazoo’s website (https://bikefriendlykalamazoo.org/about/contact/)
- Provide us with enough documentation so that we can take appropriate next steps.
All matters related to the distribution of donations must be resolved within 90 days of our event. If they are not resolved, Bike Friendly Kalamazoo will consider the matter closed and retain any monies in question to support our own mission. We hate the way that may “sound” but seriously, we’ll need to put it behind us and move on.