★ Membership and Membership Dues

Regardless of how we decide to fund C3S, it's important that we make it clear to members and potential funders that we see ourselves as adding to the charter conversation, not dividing the movement. We are not organizing "against" other voices. Instead, our role is to enrich the conversation by adding depth and understanding of our needs and interests. It's important that we recognize the important work and valuable contributions that have been made to date by the other national charter school organization.

We won’t become an effective organization until we can find a secure means to sustain our operations financially. The purpose of this “Discussion Room” is for us to collectively explore funding options. We invite you to share your thoughts on membership, dues and other possible funding streams. For example should we rely primarily on membership dues or should we look for additional funding sources? How should we define membership? We need to acknowledge at the onset that this will be a challenge as philanthropic funding in the charter sector is strongly attracted to models of scale. However, with a lot of great minds working on this -- let’s just see this as a challenge that we are ready to take on. As in the other Discussion Rooms, if you want to offer your thoughts on a topic under discussion, just add your comments to the POST. If you wish to add a new topic select: Create New Post. 

Of all the groups that give money to charters, The Walton Foundation probably spreads their money around the most. But if they decided to fund us would the association hurt more than it would help?