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I'm Treasurer of my church in Michigan, USA. We are purchasing an AED. We'd like to have more people from our congregation be CPR/AED certified. Can the church pay the ~$60 per interested person? I want to avoid "private benefit".

I think most of the interested people are going to pay for their own training, so the cost of training to the church would be much less than 1% of our budget--it doesn't feel like a "significant" amount. Also it doesn't feel very out of line for the church to spend money on improving outcomes for potential future victims of health emergencies at our facility. So my inclination is that it's fine. But I'm double checking. Thanks!

Matt Thomas
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If there is a clear benefit to the church from having more people trained in CPR/AED then the expenditure would appear to be justified. However I think the case would be strengthened if the spending was targetted to where it was needed. For example, if 100% of your congregation took the training that would clearly be excessive. It doesn't offer any real improvement over having 50% trained.

My recommendation would be to work out how many people you need trained, and where and what kind of people - how many people in Sunday services, how many in kids ministries, in seniors ministries. Then offer the training to people who you know are going to be there - for example ushers or volunteers. That also ensures that you train people who are mostly going to be there. There is no point in training a random member of the congregation who only shows up a few times a year: or training 100 people but none who are there at seniors events.

This makes sure that the expenditure is clearly for the benefit of the church (avoiding problems with the taxman); it prevents people from using the church just to get a certification that benefits them (avoiding private benefit problems); and also ensures that the church gets the highest level of safety for its expenditure.

DJClayworth
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