Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.
– Thomas Paine, The American Crisis No. 1, December 23, 1776
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This has been a week of historic victories and re-affirmation of the transformative potential of We the People after such a long, dark time in our country. We have witnessed the transformative power of diverse voices in determining the direction of civil society.
As the field of fiscal sponsorship continues to grow in response to the crises of our times and the needs of our communities, our field is also coming together as a bulwark and defense against injustice and a steward of hope and support. Despite the tremendous positive turn of the political tide, the attacks on our sector and work will continue, and we will continue to rise to the challenge. Strengthening our capacities to engage in peer governance and field accountability will be essential to our ability to stand stronger and with greater solidarity in the years to come.
Peer Governance and Our Story
We don’t tell the real back story of Social Impact Commons in our public documents, but it’s very much a story of intentional governance design. Impact Commons grew out of the fiscal sponsor I founded in 2010, CultureWorks Greater Philadelphia, which evolved and experimented with commoning principles applied to fiscal sponsorship. We viewed (and still view) the shared supports of fiscal sponsorship to be a form of commonized nonprofit management, or management commons. One of the core tenets of commoning is peer governance, governance by the principal beneficiaries of the commons resource, in CultureWorks’ case, our sponsored projects. A member-nominated and elected Membership Committee oversaw sponsored project intake, key policies, and other project-related matters, with the co-chairs as voting board members.
In 2017, following a great deal of growth in our portfolio, CultureWorks was invited by the Mellon Foundation to explore “franchising” its model to other arts and culture communities across the country. Since arts and culture are a major part of Mellon’s portfolio and fiscally sponsored grants were a growing part of it, they were seeing a need for more Model A options for arts and culture. We set out to explore this idea through a series of feasibility conversations, local pilots, and financial analyses of the broader arts and heritage landscape.
During this time, we also stood up a 501(c)(3) Type I Supporting Organization (SO), CultureWorks Commons Management, to be the central shared resource provider and “franchisor,” assuming individual CultureWorks offices would be locally formed and operated. Supporting Organizations are a subclass [509(a)(3)] of public charities that derive their charitable exemption from providing support and services to a defined group of other 501(c)(3) organizations (its “charitable class”) that would be challenged to provision those resources individually. Our charitable class would be the various CultureWorks fiscal sponsors. The choice of a Type I SO was largely owing to our commoning values and its legal requirement of member-governance. The board of a Type I SO must be nominated and elected by members of the SO, a true peer governance model.
By 2019 our exploration of this idea had resulted in the finding that franchising CultureWorks would not be feasible in the long run. Local community politics were resistant to external models, the cost and runway to establish new offices would be too long, and there was not sufficient capital scale in the arts and culture community alone to support the franchisor’s operations.
At this juncture, we had the option to simply end the exploration and return our focus to the original CultureWorks. But at the time, the field seemed to be growing around us. I had gotten involved in the National Network of Fiscal Sponsors (NNFS) starting in 2013 with their first conference. A bit later I joined its Steering Committee. As CultureWorks grew, our team was feeling a number of increasing pressures and needs for true field-level support–data to support our case to Philly funders (who at that time were largely uninterested in supporting fiscal sponsorship), better access to best practices, impact models, etc. NNFS, however, was focused on the annual conference, and was not interested in building its service capacity beyond that function – a move that admittedly would require a very different legal structure, philanthropic capital, a sound business model, and dedicated professional staff.
Around that time I had been having conversations with colleagues Asta Petkeviciute and Josh Sattely, who saw the same pressures in the field. We felt the field needed a true field building organization. We wondered if we might leverage the interest of Mellon in arts fiscal sponsorship, but expand the scope to the entire field of fiscal sponsorship, not just arts and culture. We would then have a platform to address the needs of the field that NNFS seemed unwilling to meet. After all, we already had a ready-at-hand, peer-governed nonprofit structure in CultureWorks Commons Management. All we needed to do was tweak its organizational documentation, broaden its charitable class to all fiscal sponsors, make the case to the IRS, and file for a name change. We took that proposal back to Mellon as a response to our initial feasibility study, and they accepted, providing our first multi-year commitment of capital for start-up.
In spring 2020, Asta, Josh, and I launched Social Impact Commons with the mission to be a peer-governed association for building the field of fiscal sponsorship. We started entrepreneurially with fee-for-service advisory services and technology products (Sage Intacct) to support capacity building and regular field convening (Fiscal Sponsorship Conversations). Later we added research and advocacy functions, starting with our 2023 Fiscal Sponsorship Field Scan. The program model was intended to support a predominantly earned income and community supported business model with the assumption that over-reliance on philanthropy is not a formula for long-term sustainability.
That vision has become reality. Last year we completed our first long-range strategic plan. Today, Impact Commons supports a fast-growing membership of more than 150 fiscal sponsors with a staff of 5 and annual operations of roughly $1 million, of which close to 60% is earned income. We are on path to grow earned income to 80% in the coming years, ensuring sufficient diversification of resources to support our growth as the field continues to expand.
Our Approach to Community Voice & Accountability
At the core of our model is a commitment to the values of commoning and peer governance. But that is just one element of a four-layered approach to engaging with and remaining accountable to the community we support.
Peer Governance - First and foremost is representative fiduciary governance. Our 150 members nominate and elect our board, which per bylaws can accommodate up to 15 directors. Other peer models exist, such as cooperative approaches, where all 150 members would serve as voting board members. We felt the latter would be too unwieldy to manage and that it would be a big ask to require all members to dedicate lots of time to participate in governance. And member-elected boards are the most common among general industry alliances and associations. While a smaller board may be easier to manage, you still have the question of how to bring to bear more diverse stakeholder voices, which leads us to…
Representative Advisory - Since our founding, we’ve contemplated a more formal approach to expanding community voice via a standing committee of the board that would be subject to regular open call for nominees from membership. This year, we are pleased launch the Member Stewardship Committee, envisioned to be a large and intentionally diverse advisory committee to guide our work overall and some key initiatives we will be undertaking in the next two years, notably our Fiscal Sponsorship Common Data Project, and a conversation around field self-governance and common practice.
In spring 2026, in response to growing political threats to our field, we led the organization of the Fiscal Sponsorship Action Group, a stand-alone, non-partisan caucus of 15 fiscal sponsor members of both Impact Commons and NNFS. The Group is administered by Impact Commons but is a formal part of neither Impact Commons nor NNFS. Its remit is focused more narrowly on coordination around advocacy related to legislative and regulatory matters.Convenings & Conversations - Since 2020 we have been engaged in weekly virtual convenings with goals of creating connections among sponsors and stakeholders, sharing knowledge and insights, and gathering feedback and understanding about evolving needs of the community. Over 2026, we joined these conversations with the conversation series stewarded by Andrew Schulman and Oliver Hack to create a unified Fiscal Sponsorship Conversations series, which continues as a core point of convening for the field today.
Feedback Loops - Finally, we engage in a number of regular feedback loops with our members, from occasional temp-check surveys, to our annual Member Survey, which gathers feedback on how we’re doing and what needs are emerging. We report back to our members via our Annual Impact Report, which we started in FY2024. Our 2026 Impact Report will be released in a few weeks.
This is an exciting time for fiscal sponsorship, as it grows in self-awareness and capacity. It’s a joy and honor for our team to support this process and our efforts to continue building for engagement and accountability.
In that spirit, and as always, we welcome your feedback and thoughts.
Here’s to the road ahead.
– Thaddeus Squire