A letter from the IRS, a new board, and a short explanation of why there are two acronyms.
Nobody throws a party for a piece of mail
We are making an exception.
On September 18, 2025, Letter 947 arrived from the IRS. It confirmed what a room full of volunteers had spent months working toward: Rocky Mountain AI was officially a 501(c)(3) public charity.
It is not a thrilling document. It is also the reason we can hold a bank account, sign a sponsor agreement, accept a grant, insure an event, and hand a donor a receipt that means something in April. Everything that has happened since is stacked on top of that letter.
The community is older than the paperwork by a mile. People have been showing up in Boulder to argue about AI since early 2023, back when showing up meant somebody’s coworking space and whoever remembered the projector cable. What changed last September is that the thing finally had a structure underneath it, built by the same people who had been setting up the chairs all along.
So: happy first birthday to the nonprofit. The community is in its fourth year and was never waiting for our permission.
Meet the board
New board, seated August 1, at the top of our program year.
Lauri Hofherr, President. Lauri leads the board and chairs Community and Partnerships, which means she spends her time on the relationships that get us out of Boulder: libraries, universities, chambers, civic groups, anyone along the Front Range who should know we exist.
Crys Black, Treasurer. Crys keeps the books, works with the accountant, reports revenue to the board every quarter, and chairs Communication and Operations, which owns this website, the newsletter, and how RMAI shows up everywhere else.
Karla Pascarella, Secretary. Karla keeps the record: minutes, policies, governance documents, and the open action items that would otherwise quietly evaporate between meetings.
Two more committees round it out. Korey Mercier chairs Education and Programming, the committee that exists to make life easier for the people running events. Lauri is also chairing Fundraising for now, which covers sponsorships, grants and individual giving, and is the reason there is anything in the budget to spend.
All four committees have a chair. That is new. For most of last year the honest answer to “who owns that?” was “Lauri, probably.” Now there is a name on every one, and it is the single biggest reason year two is going to look different from year one.
Every committee is also looking for members. Four to five hours a month. It is the rare kind of volunteering where you can point at a thing and say you did that.
RMAI or RMAIIG? Join the club
Here is a question we get constantly, usually from someone who has been coming to events for two years and is slightly mortified to be asking it.
If you have ever typed RMAII, squinted at it, added an I, deleted the I, put it back, and then given up and written “the AI meetup,” welcome. You are among friends. Some of us on this board have done exactly that. In writing. To a sponsor.
Two sentences:
RMAIIG is where you go. RMAI is what keeps the lights on.
RMAIIG, the Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group, is the community. Eleven Meetup groups up and down the Front Range, each with its own leader, its own page, its own calendar. If you have ever been to one of our events, you have been to a RMAIIG event.
RMAI is the nonprofit underneath. It holds the money, the filings, the insurance and the sponsor agreements, and it has four volunteer committees whose entire job is to clear the road for people who are already good at this.
RMAI governs and funds. The community delivers. Neither one works alone.