Introduction
The Praxis Project is focused on building capacity and power in communities of color that are authentically engaged in changing the systems, structures, policies, practices, and environments that underlie inequity. Our fiscal sponsorship program is one way that we are supporting capacity and power building within movement work. Our fiscal sponsorship relationships enable community power building organizers and organizations to focus on and prioritize their resources into addressing pressing priorities on health, justice, and racial equity. By providing our fiscally-sponsored projects with operational infrastructure, strategic support, and rigorous compliance with the rules for charitable organizations, we help organizers to advance their missions boldly, joyfully, and without fear.
Our Approach
What is fiscal sponsorship?
At its most basic level, fiscal sponsorship creates a contractual relationship that allows a person or group to advance charitable activities with the benefit of tax-exempt status.
What is movement building fiscal sponsorship?
Praxis’ movement building fiscal sponsorship program provides operational infrastructure to a project, working to advance new “best practices” in the field. As a fiscal sponsor seeking to build stronger movements and communities, we must recognize the inherent tension in working within oppressive systems rooted in white supremacy culture, while building power in communities to reimagine and transform those same systems. Concurrently, we work closely with our projects to follow all applicable laws and regulations, maintain standing with funders, and honor donors’ intent.
Through movement building fiscal sponsorship we seek to co-create and define the new “best practices” in service of health, justice, and racial equity, while maintaining the compliance that allows us all to operate in this field, until we can achieve the systemic change necessary for true liberation.
White supremacy culture in fiscal sponsorship
For fiscal sponsorship to be most effective, it must have a dependable and dynamic financial and human resources infrastructure. This requires having functional systems, interdependent partnerships, and staff with the capacity to ensure we can support the needs of projects while also following the rules for 501(c)(3) organizations. This means that, even as we work to reduce and eradicate white supremacy culture in our organization and partnership ecosystem, there are restrictions that exist in our financial and accounting systems. These restrictions ensure that funds are being spent on charitable purposes, that we obtain clean independent financial audits annually, and that we can continue to operate as a 501(c)(3) organization and fiscal sponsor.
We recognize that we partner with politically targeted people, organizations, and movements. The media and government agencies scrutinize their finances, looking for the smallest mistakes, to reduce trust in organizations and movement leaders. This ultimately creates chaos inside organizations, disrupting the work for liberation. We've also seen organizations in our field get investigated on the basis of bureaucratic and seemingly arbitrary requirements (e.g., not submitting a form) and shut down due to politically motivated attacks. We take this very seriously and maintain strong financial controls while continually assessing our practices to ensure movement leaders can lead safely and confidently in an often oppressive political and cultural environment.
Additional examples of how we see white supremacy culture showing up in fiscal sponsorship work includes:
Promoting organizational stability without a social justice lens i.e. uplifting operational infrastructure that blindly reproduces practices from larger white-led organizations and honors the ability to navigate inherently unjust systems, rather than structuring an organization in the manner that best achieves social justice goals.
Operating within hyper-capitalist frameworks i.e. qualifying success as organizational growth and ability to retain additional funding instead of deepened relationships and ability to sustain existing funding.
Making policies because “that’s how it’s always been done” i.e. copy-pasting policies without pausing to investigate if they are necessary, legally required, and/or culturally competent and regarding everything that falls outside of those policies as an “exception.”
Praxis’ movement building fiscal sponsorship approach is a call to action. Click to learn more about each call to action and how we practice it below:
