2024-04-08T08:35:40-04:00 2023-12-31 990EZ 2023-01-01 823302464 UNIVERSAL LOVE ALLIANCE FOUNDATION % Lanny Arvan UNIV 2173558399 PO BOX 949 ESPANOLA NM 875320949 Lanny Arvan Vice President and Treasurer 2024-04-08 2023 2023-04-26 12:10:37Z X https: www.universallovealliance.org X X 105630 X 105630 0 0 0 105630 107496 107496 -1866 6429 4563 6429 4563 0 0 6429 4563 0 0 6429 4563 The Universal Love Alliance Foundation raises funds on behalf of Universal Love Alliance an NGO in Uganda. The largest single component is direct contributions to the ULAF Bank Account by ULAF Board Members. 0 51428 The next largest category bundles Amazon Smile Facebook and Meta as well as PayPal net contributions. 0 34286 These are 3 grants from Gene Keys Publishing Ltd. 13635 X 13635 99349 Susan Olsen President 1 0 0 0 Lanny Arvan Vice-President and Treasurer 5 0 0 0 Jean Altshuler Secretary 2 0 0 0 Rosy Aronson Board Member 2 0 0 0 Rita Halgato Board Member 1 0 0 0 Anthony Carlson Board Member 0.5 0 0 0 false false false false false 0 false false false false NM Lanny Arvan 3009 SUMMITHILL PL CHAMPAIGN IL 618226189 2173558399 false false false false false false false false false false false NONE NONE X 52013 51895 85723 66575 105630 361836 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 52013 51895 85723 66575 105630 361836 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 361836 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 52013 51895 85723 66575 105630 361836 1 1 0 0.00 X RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED RESTRICTED Part I, line 16 | Other Expenses:, Amount:| Money transfers to ULA in Uganda plus transfer fees and sales tax., $107496| Part II, line 24 | Explanation:, BOYAmount:, EOYAmount:| Inventory, $, $| Prepaid Expenses, $, $| Organization's share of assets, $, $| Part II, line 26 | Explanation:, BOYAmount:, EOYAmount:| Accounts Payable, $, $| Grants Payable, $, $| Mortgages or other loans payable, $, $| Misc, $, $| Part III, General | Explanation:| Universal Love Alliance ULA is an NGO in Uganda. ULA promotes human rights and provides assistance to marginalized people. Universal Love Alliance Foundation ULAF is a charity in the U.S. that receives donations on behalf of ULA in Uganda. The funds that ULAF wires to ULA are sent quarterly and on an as needed basis. The ULAF Board serves as informal consultants to ULA to help ULA meet new potential grant organizations and to assist in writing grant proposals as well as important correspondence that ULA conducts. Board members serve as volunteers so ULAF bears no labor costs. There is also no ULAF office. Board members work out of their respective homes. Email and Facebook Messenger are the most common forms of communication but sometimes there are Board meetings in Zoom. ULA and ULAF share a Website: https: www.universallovealliance.org . ULA and ULAF have a separate presence in Facebook. Indeed because ULA is in Uganda Facebook won't allow it to do fundraising directly. Part III, General | Explanation:| ULA does receive some donations directly that don't go through ULAF. And ULA has grants where funds are sent directly to Uganda and not through ULAF. Those funds are not considered here. We only look at funds that do go through ULAF. Given the structure described above the main costs for ULAF are in receiving funds from PayPal and in wiring funds to Uganda from the ULAF bank account. In our accounting the PayPal receipts are the net payment that the donors make. The costs of wire transfers are a set fee of $45 and then a state sales tax of $4.02 per transfer irrespective of the amount being wired to Uganda. In mid 2023 the set fee was reduced to $25 and the sales tax to $2.17.. We try to balance economizing on these transfer costs and meeting ULA's needs for funding. Our solution is not perfect but it is workable. There is also a modest fee for registering ULAF with the state of New Mexico. That is the entirety of the costs on line 16 of F990EZ. The letter from the IRS saying that ULAF was approved as a charity is dated January 18 2018. We take this as the first day of operation for ULAF. Some of the functions described above were happening informally before that date. That matters some in what follows. For years 2020 - 2023 the above structure is fully accounted for in ULAF bank statements which we have used to calculate both the revenue and cost numbers. Things were somewhat different in 2019 and 2018 because of the following. Rather than wire transfer we primarily relied on Western Union as the means for transferring funds to Uganda. We switched totally to wire transfer near the end of 2019 after we had some serious problems with Western Union. Until that time however we could use Western Union out of the ULAF bank account but we could also use Western Union out of a personal bank account that Lanny Arvan Vice-President and Treasurer of ULAF had set up for this purpose prior to the existence of ULAF. In those early years some of the funds sent to Uganda came out of this personal bank account rather than the ULAF account. This was more convenient to facilitate the transaction but was less convenient for doing the accounting. Unfortunately this personal bank account doesn't have statements that go back to those years. So instead we went back to the email receipts for each transaction to construct a record of Western Union use out of this personal account. In Schedule A Form 990 2022 Part II Section A Public Support line 1 this explains how we computed the yearly entries. Part II, General | Explanation:| Now another point that is important to note with this return. We don't provide any itemization at all for how ULA uses the funds. They have a very wide variety of activities indeed and we are certainly not giving an activity based budgeting for them. But this is important for another reason as well. Sometimes the ULA Executive Director Turinawe Samson would make a request for funds that he thought was necessary though entirely outside the scope of ULA work. For example in 2021 the wife of Bishop Senyonjo passed away. The Bishop had been Samson's mentor before he retired. Samson requested some funds to pay for the funeral and other funds to cover the Bishop's care immediately thereafter. Lanny Arvan agreed to pay for that and the funds were sent - using the same wire transfer mechanism as for other transfers. In each year of ULAF's operation there have been some transfers of this sort that really are private exchanges but leveraged the money transfer mechanism that already was in place. This matters because starting in 2021 we have filed form 990EZ while in 2018 2019 and 2020 we filed form 990-N the email postcard. By what we have written in Schedule A it seems we were slightly over the limit in 2019 and 2020 while well under the limit in 2018. In fact we were under the limit in each of these years. We chose to report the full amount transferred during the year rather than try to break out the transfers that were of a personal nature. Indeed sometimes those were bundled with money intended for ULA work. We would estimate that in the last 4 years somewhere in the ballpark of $3,000-$6,000 per year went to transfers for personal use. We recognize that if the recipient of the transfers were also a U.S. organization then these should have been broken out fully. But with the recipient in Uganda having a transfer mechanism that is functional counts for a lot. We felt it better to use that than to experiment with some other way of getting funds to Uganda. If needed we can back out the individual transactions that arose from these personal requests. It is laborious to do so as it requires going through rather extensive Facebook Messenger threads to find the appropriate messages. But it can be done if necessary. Part III, General | Explanation:| Let's close by noting that much of what ULAF Board members do is entrepreneurial work as individuals or as a group to identify new donors or new organizations that might make grants in support of ULA work. And then time is spent getting these people comfortable with the ULA leadership and the ULAF Board. Some of this effort goes for naught of course. But even if successful it might be hard to tell from the information reported in this form. Individual donations get bundled with all the other donations that come or might be sent directly to ULA in Uganda. Grants don't get bundled in this same way but they too might go directly to ULA in Uganda. For others to understand how effectively ULAF functions they really need to see the full picture of ULA funding.