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Driving

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Requirements for drivers

All individuals who drive as part of their work with Raft Foundation must hold a valid driver’s license and always be properly insured.

Driving beneficiaries to appointments, etc.

If you intend to offer to drive people (e.g., elders, unhoused or underemployed people) from place to place as part of your project activities, please reach out before doing so, as this has increased liability and we will need to notify our insurer.

Driving a rental car

As long as all drivers meet the above requirements, using rental cars or rental trucks for project activities is totally acceptable.

If a rental car driver has a driver’s license but does not have car insurance, full rental car liability insurance should be purchased.

Unlike for personal vehicles, as described below, we can reimburse gasoline, upkeep, insurance, and other related costs for hired vehicles.

Driving your own car

Using your personal vehicle for project activities is also allowed.

Accounting standards dictate that we cannot reimburse gasoline receipts1 or gasoline cards for personal vehicles, even if they are used extensively for project activities. We also cannot cover repairs or upkeep of personal vehicles,2 or other expenses such as car insurance.

Instead, we reimburse based on mileage, following the process below.

Mileage reimbursement

In an effort to properly compensate3 Raft project leads and volunteers for the use of their personal vehicles, we follow a special process for mileage reimbursement.

The mileage reimbursement rate for 2025 is $0.70 per mile.4

The process is as follows:

  1. Submit an invoice expense on the project’s Open Collective page
  2. Title it “Mileage reimbursement”
  3. Enter line items for each trip, and include the number of times you took that trip in parentheses
  4. Make the amount for each line item the product of the current mileage rate (above), the trip length in miles, and the number of times the trip was taken
  5. Attach (to the expense submission) screenshots of each trip from OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, or another similar provider5

Please let us know if you have any questions!

Vulnerable populations

If you are working with vulnerable populations, where surfacing their home address could put them at risk (were Raft to be audited), we can make an exception and allow mileage reimbursements to be submitted without a map of the route. This exception is made on a program-by-program basis; contact us to seek approval.

Footnotes

  1. Unless the gasoline was used to power a generator. When submitting for reimbursement, please indicate the gasoline’s use. ↩

  2. Unless the repairs or upkeep are part of a mutual aid program, as long as the owner is not a Raft project member. ↩

  3. In typical American Congressional fashion, the non-taxable reimbursement rate of $0.14 for mileage for charities has not been updated in decades. We choose instead to “reimburse” at the current for-profit rate, $0.70, even though this means it will be taxable income for you. ↩

  4. This is the IRS’s rate, which is also near AAA’s estimate of the true per-mile cost of driving. ↩

  5. This may also be done in the expense comments after submission if you have any trouble attaching them. ↩

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