Anyone with experience setting up a 501(3)(c) charitable organization?

Hackernews is my go to community site, I have no idea if this will work, but let's hope the HN magic does its work.

I've been volunteering at a small team that organize programs and activities and we are partially funded through a well-established foundation. We want to have more autonomy in how we do things and scale things a bit, thus we are exploring how to set up a 501(3)(c) organization.

It's been dificult keep things running as everyone on the team either has a job or a degree to persuit. The funding we get right now is only for the program and does not allow us to employee anyone, they are our backer, but they are not our fiscal sponsor, their policy does not allow that, we don't have other organization we know that would sponsor us and we'd like to be able to receive donations and employee people on our own, hence registering as a 501(3)(c) seems to be the only viable way.

I know YC accepts non-profit into their program, but we do not think we fit the bill, we are pretty small, we do not provide service and turn it into revenue, we just organize things, and hopefully we might be able to do more we reached a bigger capacity.

Thank you for reading this!