When I was 47 I got lured into a nonprofit. It was like a legend, where my every deed led to a new adventure and pulled me deeper into the story.

First a respected retired client lunched with me and shared her dream: to build affordable housing that would integrate a little community of neighbors which included individuals of different ages, races, and capabilities.

I couldn’t discourage that.

So she asked me to set up the nonprofit. That begins with incorporation, which is a straightforward process just about anyone can do with a how-to book or (in this case) one’s own business incorporation papers to use as a guide.

But you can’t set up a corporation without naming it. I spent a weekend walking around thinking about what the organization intended to do. The word that floated to the surface after awhile was “hearth.” Yes. Even if what was built didn’t have a fireplace, we wanted to create that space where people would naturally congregate.

The full name is Hearth Homes Community Building, but I think of it as just “hearth.” What a word: hear and heart and earth in there.

Next up was the nonprofit part. That’s kind of what I do for a living. I get tax-favored status for retirement plans. The arm of the IRS I know was then called EP/EO (Employee Plans/Exempt Organizations). It has now, in that government way of never really settling into its acronym, switched to TE/GE (Tax Exempt/Government Entities). Under either name, it’s the division for nonprofit organizations and qualified plans. I submitted Hearth for 501(c)(3) status.

That brought up two new issues. One was the “safe harbor” for affordable builders, for which Hearth was eligible. Because we wanted to serve poorer folks and families, we were granted immediate but provisional status. We then had a few years to prove ourselves (done).

The other was our “mission.” As with the naming, the tax application required that I give more thought to what Hearth really aimed to accomplish.

I’m still pleased, even 14 years later, with this:

To build a place where
neighborhood is possible
without exclusion

Hey, it lasted a few months. But you know what they say about committees, and the same is true of boards of directors. They began adding words. They turned those 17 syllables into a sociology paper.