The Flowing Waters Institute Has Been Founded

Today I acted on something I've been thinking about for a while. I want to have a tax-exempt nonprofit corporation as a structure for supporting funded research on aquatic biology in the U.S., especially stream ecology. So today I filed the papers that established the Flowing Waters Institute Inc. as an Alabama nonprofit corporation, and received an Employer Identification Number (EIN) from the IRS. From here I will put together the paperwork to have this entity recognized by the IRS as a 501c(3) tax-exempt nonprofit. What I hope to do is make this a clearinghouse with the correct corporate structure to receive donations and funding from various sources to support both research and education efforts, not just by me but by others too. One inspiration for this is a group called the Cascadia Research Collective in Olympia, Washington. They started in 1979 and do some major funded research on marine mammals, with money from various federal agencies and some help and student volunteers from Evergreen State College in WA. Much of the research that I and others I know do doesn't require the same large overhead such as research vessels that marine mammal work entails, but it should be possible to coordinate more large efforts than are typical in the field. This is still something of a "blue sky" idea but I feel motivated to launch it. A web site for this will be up soon, and I already have the new email system running. You can contact me at stallsmith at flowing-waters.org.