Great news - the United States Internal Revenue Service has notified ERE Foundation, Inc. that we have been recognized as a 501(c)3 organization.

This means that all contributions made to the ERE Foundation since July 24, 2006 are tax deductible!

As a new Foundation, we’re off to a good start - in our first partial year of operations, we raised almost $30,000 for children’s educational causes, and we are just getting started!

In the spirit of transparency, we have also publicly posted the Foundations’ 2006 financial information here.

Many thanks to all the people who helped us organize and raise money, in particular Dick Gast, Jason Davis and Sean Rehder!

Jason Davis of Recruiting.com offered to host a poker tournament to benefit the ERE Foundation last fall — he was one of the first members of the community to pledge his support. Tomorrow he makes good on his promise (as we knew he would)!

Recruiting luminaries from across the country (and Canada, of course) are traveling up to Toronto for Jason’s poker tournament. Pictures, and hopefully a few stories, to follow.

The ERE Silent Auction this week was a massive success. A big thanks to all the bidders and all those whose winning bids will get them iPods, trips to Amsterdam, TVs, and more.

The ERE Foundation will invest the money (more than $19,000!), where it will go a long way toward helping children. ERE will pay all administrative expenses and 100% of the funds will go to charitable causes.

Kudos to the donors.

If your organization is thinking about making a donation for the ERE Foundation’s upcoming charity auction, now’s the time to do it. The ERE Foundation team needs time to set up bidding in advance of the auction, so Friday, September 1, is the cut-off for donations to this auction.

In summary, if you want to make a contribution to the ERE Foundation cause:

1. Check out the items to be auctioned page to see what others have donated.
2. Contact us to make a donation.
3. Do it by Friday, September 1!

We’re happy to report that we’ve just taken the first big step toward getting the ERE Foundation off the ground with the launch of the website. With only six weeks to our first charity auction, the hard part of spreading the word and securing donations is ahead of us.

If you’re new to the site (which is almost certainly the case if you’re reading this), click on the links to your right to learn more about what the ERE Foundation stands for and, most importantly, how you can help. You’ll also find a list of participating organizations and major sponsors.

We designed this site to function much like a blog. That allows various members of the foundation to post news and updates regularly. It also means we can get feedback and participation from the community in the form of comments (scroll to the end of this message and you’ll see what we mean). We’ve even got RSS feeds you can subscribe to if you really want to stay up to date with what we’re doing.

If you’ve got suggestions for the ERE Foundation or about our website, feel free to share them with everyone in the form of comments or to email us directly. With your help and participation, the ERE Foundation will grow larger than any of us expected and give the staffing community a means to make a difference in the world.