Free A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans by Thea Sabin

and safety procedures for the building or area. Some buildings won’t allow you to have open flames or might have other restrictions to meet the terms of their insurance policies.
    If you are teaching anything physical where people might get hurt, you might want to have participants sign a waiver. Waivers are enforceable only to a point, and even if you have one you might still be sued if something goes horribly wrong, but making participants sign a waiver signals to them that what they’re doing might injure them, and that they need to be careful and take what you’re doing seriously.
    Another instance in which you might want to get waivers or permission letters is if you are teaching children or teens. As we all know, not all parents are happy about having their children run off to learn Paganism. Waivers or permission letters help you keep parents fully informed of what their children are getting into and what to expect. If an underage student’s parents or caregivers won’t sign your waiver or permission letter, don’t take on that student.
    Taxes and Licenses
    If you are charging for teaching, in many cases you will need to report your income and pay taxes on it. The government doesn’t recognize the spiritual meaning teaching might hold for you—it just sees a revenue source. As T. Thorn Coyle put it: “No matter how we look at it emotionally or mentally, the government requires that we treat anything we take money for as a business.” The government isn’t going to hunt you down if you teach one or two classes and charge $10 for materials, but if you are thinking of teaching regularly or even sort of regularly, taxes are part of the picture.
    In some cases you can declare your teaching income on your personal taxes, and in others you will need to get a business license of some kind. Another option is to start a small nonprofit and derive an income through that. Whether or not you need the license or to file for nonprofit status will depend on how much you teach, how you market yourself, what percentage of your annual income comes from teaching, and the laws of your state and city.
    As I mentioned, I have never charged for teaching Paganism, but I have charged for teaching other things. Originally when I charged for teaching, it was related to a small sole-proprietor business I owned, so I reported the income as part of the business. More recently my teaching income has been very small, and I’ve been able to declare it on my “regular” taxes as consulting fees using an additional schedule.
    If you have an accountant, ask him or her if you can get away with not having a business license. If you don’t have an accountant, check out the government website for your state for the requirements and/or for information on forming a nonprofit. In my state, the information about business licenses and sole proprietorships (the kind of business where you are the only employee, and the most commonly used type of business license for people teaching by themselves and not as part of an organization) is in the Business License Service section of the Department of Revenue. In your state, it might be somewhere else. If you get lost in your state government website (most of them are such a mess that you’ll need a compass and a canteen to get out alive), just Google “business license” and the name of your state. You might also want to check out any requirements that your city has on top of the state ones. The city I live in requires business licenses in some situations that are not required by the state.
    For a couple of different perspectives, I asked Christopher Penczak and T. Thorn Coyle how they handled taxes and licensure. Christopher draws income from more than one source, and he told me about his situation (a DBA allows you to do business under a name other than your legal one; it means “Doing Business As”):
    I am a sole proprietor for my main