Starting a Chapter Of
Rich Women Sisterhood™

Any Rich Women Sister whose membership is in good standing may start a chapter.

The responsibilities of a Rich Women Sisterhood™ Chapter Leader is to oversee chapter activities, recruit members, maintain membership records, and communicate with Rich Women Sisterhood™ headquarters.  These activities can be done by various club members, but the chapter leader is ultimately responsible for seeing that they are done.

There are Seven Easy Steps to Launching A Rich Women Sisterhood™ Chapter and Become a Chapter Leader:

1. Register yourself as a sister member of Rich Women Sisterhood.
2. Register your Chapter and establish a username/password for yourself as the chapters leader. Register your chapter now».
3. Pay the annual chapter dues of $10.00 In order to keep administrative costs down registration is done online. The chapter dues help cover administrative costs.
4. Form an online group for your chapter.  This step is not required, but recommended.
5. Reach out to other women, inviting them to become a member of your chapter.
6. Have your members register themselves online as Rich Women Sisters.  Have them identify your chapter ID# when they register.  (Your chapter ID# will be on your chapter charter certificate, and in your chapter acceptance email).  Alternatively you can manage your chapter online.
7. Have fun while making the world a better place by deciding what enrichment activities, and enriching projects you would like to do your first year.

No - you won't be on your own.  You'll have the assistance of a the national membership chair, and the regional coordinator.  The regional coordinators primary function is to assist local chapters with getting their chapter started, and with planning regional events.

How you recruit members for your Rich Women Sisterhood™ chapter is up to you.  Some chapters will be made up of people who previously knew each other so the method in that case would be simply to make a few phone calls, tell them what you are doing, and refer the members to the Rich Women Sisterhood site for more info. If this is how you are forming your chapter, we would like to encourage you to reach out and try to recruit a few women you don't know as new relationships are one way to enRICH your life.

Simply starting a new chapter with a couple of girlfriends who invite their friends and so on will usually result in a full chapter in no time.

Another way is to decide what you want to do and reach out to other people who have the same interests.  Advertising is one way to do that.  You can advertise your new group at the Rich Women Sisterhood site, at Craigslist.com, on your local newspapers website, or flyers.  You can also use online social networking places, and sites like Meetup.com to advertise your chapter events.

Submitting a press release to your local newspaper is another way to recruit members.

You're free to have as many members as you wish.  However, in most cases we recommend that you limit your membership to twenty sisters. If the chapter grows to large the members may begin to feel more like a smaller fish in a larger sea, and each member isn't given the opportunity to grow, and to give back in a meaningful way. 

You can always do some activities with other chapters.

Most chapters meet monthly. But, you may determine the frequency of your meetings. You're free to schedule your meetings on weekends, nights, or during the day.  It is helpful to keep your target sisterhood members in mind when setting the meeting time.  If you wanting to create a resource to enRICH stay-at-home mom's lives, then often a monthly lunch with a guest speaker may be your best bet.  In that case the kids may just play together while the mom's meet.  With other chapters the goal may be time away from the kids and an evening meeting may be best.

Rich Women Sisterhood™ chapter activities, called "EnRICHment Activities," can vary greatly from chapter to chapter, and will be generally be based on the common interests of the members, or based on the interests of the founding sister.

For example...

One group of women may form a chapter based on a love of knitting. Their chapter activities may be getting together to knit once a month. Perhaps some of their Enriching Others Projects would be knitting hats for the homeless shelter, and teaching youth in a local 4-H club how to knit.

Another group may value education and get together to learn new skills. Their Enriching Others Project may be in turn teaching those skills to kids at a local school.

While still another chapter may be formed solely for the purpose of enriching others lives. With that mission. they may base their entire membership activities on service.

Each local chapter is free to choose the focus of their chapter, and the enriching activities and projects they participate in.  You may find it helpful to ask yourself these two questions when deciding on an activity:  Will this enRICH the lives of the members in some way?  Will it enRICH the lives of others?  These two questions may be helpful if you are deciding between two different activities: Which one of these activities will most likely enrich the lives of our sisters the most? Which one of these EnRICHing Others Activities will have the biggest impact?

We do hope that many chapters will choose to base their monthly activities around the Rich Women In Focus™ theme of the month.  Rich Women Sisterhood is putting together extensive resources related to each In Focus theme.  These resources are designed to help women create change in their life, and to take their life to the next level.

Most Rich Women Sisterhood™ club activities will follow under the category of an enRICHing activity, or an EnRICHing Sisters Project, and EnRICHing Others Project.

Enriching activities are ones that enriches the lives of the Rich Women Sisterhood members.  Example activities would be attending a play, or getting together for dinner.

An EnRICHing Sisters Project is a multi-task job that results in something specific. Examples of this is when members come together to learn a new enRICHing skill such as quilting, or baking bread.  Or when they get together to discuss, learn, and focus on the Rich Women In Focus™ theme of the month.

A club activity that is carried out for the benefit of people other than the members become an EnRICHing Others Project.

Rich Women In Focus™ is basically a "monthly focus" or a focused effort from the Rich Women Sisterhood, as a whole, on some enRICHing aspect of life.  The focus is related to the theme of the month. Local chapters may want to consider basing their activities on the Rich Women in Focus™ theme of the month:

January - Purpose
February - Authenticity
March - Creativity
April - Sisterhood
May - Renewal
June - Confidence
July - Adventure
August - Vision
September - Abundance
October - Strength & Vitality
November - Gratitude
December - Joy

There is a $30.00 chapter registration fee, and annual dues of $30.00. Plus your chapter will probably also have additional expenses such as postage, birthday cards, printing of flyers etc.

To recover those expenses some chapter chairs may choose to charge dues, some may choose to just ask members for donations, while others will just divide the costs evenly among all chapter participants.

Some chapters may charge a small annual fee, or monthly dues to it's members, while others may adopt a pay-as-you-go method.  This method allows members to pay for the individual activities that they participate in.  Either method is acceptable.  However, the local club leadership must make it clear that Rich Women Sisterhood™ headquarters is not collecting those additional fees.

There are rules governing some local chapter events.  Click here to view those.

Regardless of the way your chapter operates the most important aspect in handling chapter money is to keep good records.  The chapter should keep record of all incoming and outgoing funds.  If your chapter uses a pay-as-you go method and money changes hands for the purchase of tickets the chapter needs to provide a receipt of some kind to document the incoming money. 

If your chapter has dues you'll want to open a chapter bank account.  The laws governing chapter bank accounts vary from country to country.  For example, to open a bank account in the United States the chapter would need to apply for an EIN number.  The account should require the signature of two members to write or cash a check. 

Cash donations, made for the chapters benefit, must be acknowledged in writing to the donor and must include the amount of the contribution. A copy of the acknowledgment must be kept with the treasurer’s records.

Currently our budget does not allow us to do that.  However, as our budget grows we may consider requests for special funding to help supplement various giving back campaigns and events.

Many Rich Women Sisterhood chapters will want to operate with club officers, but the decision to have officers is entirely up to the local chapter. 

There are advantages to having officers.  The primary advantage is that the work load is more likely to be shared among several people. 

Rich Women Sisterhood™ is currently not a non-profit organization, meaning that they have not applied, or have not been accepted, as a non-profit organization as required by the laws of the United States of America. However, a portion of membership dues are donated to various non-profit organizations.

Rich Women Giving Back campaigns are campaigns organized for the purpose of enriching others lives.  Rich Women Enriching Other Campaigns are part of Giving Back campaigns.

Membership fees are used to grow the mission of Rich Women Sisterhood™ worldwide and to improve the experience of it's members. 

While much of our work is done by volunteers, the organization’s effectiveness and ability to meet its mission is dependent upon the quality of its staff and achieving that mission comes with various costs.  Among those are the cost of insurance, office space, membership tools and resources, utilities, computers, web hosting, bandwidth, telephone, and other office expenses. Along with, employee salaries including customer service representatives, programmers, event coordinators, administrative salaries, and cost of outsourced labor such as bookkeeping and accounting, legal services, and creative services. 

Chapter dues are used to cover the expenses of the chapters enrichment activities.  Some chapters may elect to use their funds to support various Rich Women Giving Back™ campaigns.  Chapters are run by volunteers.  Chapter leaders are not paid a salary.