About Us

Mission

We bring communities together to share the resources needed to deliver efficient impact and build a just and flourishing society.

We are building the first national network and community of practice advancing management commons as a model of equitable and inclusive resource sharing for the nonprofit sector—a next-generation approach to fiscal sponsorship.

Vision

Everyone with the will to create social good has access to the resources they need for their vision and purpose to flourish.

There is a management commons in every community, supporting people working to build a better world.

Social Impact Commons is the country’s first incubator and shared resource provider supporting the fiscal sponsorship, or commons management community. We’re here to support the creation of new fiscal sponsors, and to support the growth of emerging and established fiscal sponsors. 

Our approach is designed to build the capacity of the field through shared knowledge, language, impact measures, tools, technology platforms, and expertise targeting the immediate needs of fiscal sponsors.

The many social and economic challenges we face today mandate that the fiscal sponsorship ecosystem grow—especially with fiscal sponsors of, by, and for communities of color and other marginalized groups. Local community stewardship and field expertise are everything. So growth is not about making bigger fiscal sponsors, but rather more fiscal sponsors able to reach beyond urban centers, cross language and cultural barriers, and leverage trust and knowledge already in abundance.

We believe commons management can make the work of our sector more equitable, inclusive, resilient, and impactful. Fiscal sponsorship is not a solution just for start-up or temporary projects. It is a way to share essential nonprofit infrastructure for the long term: staff, technology, systems, policies, practices, risk, and even formation and tax status. Most critically, it can be a solution for repositioning and sharing resources among the many struggling small nonprofits that make up the majority of our sector.

Our journey began in 2018-19 with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. We focused initially on creating a model to replicate the work of our Founding Organization Member, CultureWorks Greater Philadelphia, in other communities. We quickly realized that the model we were building could benefit a much broader ecosystem of social good work, and thus Social Impact Commons was born.