Public Benefit Guides
One hard question at a time, written down.
Each Guide takes one thing a volunteer board is asked to decide and sets out the whole of it in the Canadian context, in plain language, with its sources dated. The same shape every time: the book, a free Primer, and the people who can help.
How a Guide is made, and kept.
A book is still the best way anyone has found to gather a set of ideas and make them portable. In a digital world it also goes out of date faster than it used to. So the Guides are published to be revised.
Beneath every Guide sits a research base built for the purpose: Canadian charity and not-for-profit law across fourteen jurisdictions, with the statutes, the cases, the regulator guidance and the government forms each held in one place so that nothing quietly drifts out of date in two places at once. Each book prints the date its sources were last confirmed, because a guide that will not say when it was last checked is asking the reader to take its currency on faith.
Between editions, corrections are recorded on the book's own page here, with their dates, so a reader with the first printing can see what has moved. Each new edition takes in what we have learned about how the book is used. The aim is a short cycle: a Guide that is current in the year you are reading it, not the year it was written.
No Guide has an author's name on it. The corporation is named instead, because these books are not one person's argument. They are the standing position of an organization that intends to keep them current for as long as they are needed, and to be answerable for them when they are wrong.