Our Association - Les Amis de Beauford Delaney

In France, it is surprisingly easy to create a non-profit association. Basically, all you need are two people and the desire to create an organization to achieve some goal. Neither age nor nationality is important. You write the statutes for your association, submit them to the local authorities along with a couple of additional supporting documents, and await the arrival of a confirmation notice from the authorities indicating that your organization has been created. This generally occurs within five days of your submission, provided that there is no problem with the paperwork that you submit.

Approximately a month after receiving the confirmation notice, an announcement will appear in a French government publication called Journal Officiel. You must pay the journal to cover its costs for printing this announcement, but once it has been published, your organization can engage in legally binding operations. It is also eligible to receive subsidies from government and other institutions.

I undertook the task of creating our organization a few weeks ago and the process has gone very smoothly thus far. I took care to solicit advice about how to construct the statutes of the association so that they would be broad enough to allow us to engage in a wide variety of activities in pursuit of our goal. There were no questions about our documentation when I went to the Prefecture de Police (the local authority responsible for managing applications for non-profit associations), and the confirmation letter was signed three days later. It arrived within the expected time frame. We still have a couple of weeks to wait before the appearance of the announcement in Journal Officiel.