Formation & registration
Pennsylvania regulates solicitation under the Solicitation of Funds for Charitable Purposes Act, administered by the Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations. A small co-op is usually under the registration threshold. Note that Pennsylvania’s better-known requirement for co-ops — the Act 153 child abuse clearances — is a screening question, not a registration one, and is covered separately below.
Administered by Pennsylvania Department of State — Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations
Every source below is the agency or legislature that makes the rule. We do not cite compliance vendors.
An organization receiving less than $25,000 a year in contributions is not required to register under the Solicitation Act. Once it receives more than $25,000 in gross national contributions it must register within 30 days, on Form BCO-10 — and registration is also triggered, regardless of amount, by compensating anyone to solicit contributions from Pennsylvania residents.
Pennsylvania runs a second, distinct filing for institutions of purely public charity, and being exempt from the Solicitation Act does not automatically mean having nothing to file. The department describes an exemption where the institution receives contributions of less than $25,000 a year and its program service revenue does not equal or exceed $5,000,000. Small charities under the stated thresholds are described as excepted — confirm which of the two regimes you fall under before concluding you owe nothing.
Pennsylvania’s Act 153 of 2014 requires child abuse and criminal history clearances for volunteers with direct contact with children. That is a screening obligation, not a registration one, and it is not affected by whether your co-op registers with the Bureau or is under any dollar threshold. We keep it in a separate cited dataset — the link below — precisely so the two never get conflated. An earlier automated attempt to classify Pennsylvania’s requirements got Act 153 wrong, which is why this page points at that dataset rather than summarizing it here.
We publish this rather than hiding it. A gap is a question for your accountant or attorney, not a suggestion that nothing applies.
This page covers forming and registering the organization. Whether your volunteers must be screened is governed by a different set of laws, which we maintain separately with its own citations — so the two can never quietly disagree with each other.
Pennsylvania volunteer screening requirementsOnly states we have actually read the law for appear here. We would rather cover three states honestly than fifty by extrapolation — if your state is missing, that is why.
Back to the homeschool co-op toolkitThis page is general information, not legal or tax advice. Statutes are amended, agencies reinterpret them, and how any of this applies turns on facts specific to your co-op. Verify against the cited source before you file anything, and take structure and exemption questions to an accountant or attorney licensed in Pennsylvania.
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