Tennessee Counseling Association

Finance Committee Report

November, 2007

Conference, Cool Springs

Committee Members:

Becky Murray, Chair

John Mitchell, TCA Treasurer

Carlene Ford

Since its formulation in March, 2007, the Finance Committee has set as one of its goals to offer guidelines to the TCA membership for applying for grants from TCA.  We were also charged with the responsibility of providing financial advice and input to the Governing Council.

In July, our committee recommended that a grant be given to the TMHCA division of TCA to assist them in bringing Dr. William Glasser to our 50^th Anniversary conference celebration in Cool Springs.  At the recommendation of the Finance Committee, TCA provided a grant in the amount of $2000 to assist them in their efforts. We are very pleased that  Dr. Glasser is providing a  preconference for TCA/TMHCA on Sunday and will be our keynote speaker on Sunday night.

In order to make the grant application policy and procedures available to all the membership, it has been placed on the TCA website and is available for download.  We hope that chapters and divisions will be able to use these grants to provide educational and developmental opportunities to all counselors throughout the state.

In line with providing financial advice, we also recommended that TCA place its savings into a money market savings account in order to maximize the amount we were receiving in interest.  This has been done and has resulted in a considerable increase in the amount of interest being drawn on the TCA bank accounts.

We have continued to pursue the possibility of state tax exempt status but will need to change our current status of 501C6 to that of 501C3 in order to qualify.  This may not be possible but we will continue to investigate ways to accomplish this.

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