In April, TSNE and the National Network of Fiscal Sponsors hosted a conversation to explore how fiscal sponsors could reimagine their services as a means to provide the critical financial management, human resources, and legal supports grassroots groups need to strengthen communities. Over 80 executive directors, program managers, foundation leaders, and board members across the country attended Reimagining Fiscal Sponsorship in Service of Equity. We facilitated this interactive session featuring a panel and break-out room conversations to:
- Understand emerging practices and learnings from CultureWorks Greater Philadelphia, the Foraker Group, Movement Strategy Center, and Urban Affairs Coalition as they work to provide holistic, responsive, and culturally aligned fiscal sponsorship services to support the unique needs of grassroots groups
- Share the Learning Lab’s agile thinking and human-centered design toolkit for nonprofits, allowing attendees to begin co-designing actionable solutions with their fiscally sponsored organizations
- Learn from and deepen connections with values-aligned fiscal sponsors committed to strengthening their equity-informed practices
During our session, we reviewed how the Learning Lab uses agile thinking and human-centered design to create actionable solutions with fiscally sponsored organizations and other under-resourced grassroots groups. Shavel’le Olivier, a Learning Lab board member and executive director of Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition then moderated an insightful panel conversation with four fiscal sponsor leaders. The panelists were Anya de Marie of Movement Strategies Center, Arun Prabhakaran of Urban Affairs Coalition, Beth Warshaw of CultureWorks Greater Philadelphia, and Laurie Wolf of the Foraker Group. These leaders shared how COVID-19 and racial injustice laid bare fiscal sponsorship’s structural inequities, explored how fiscal sponsors can advance equity to better support grassroots groups, and shared other emerging learnings. Attendees explored how to actionize these emerging learnings within their organizations and were invited to find accountability partners to support them in leading organizational change.
More Information
If you are committed to strengthening your equity-informed fiscal sponsorship and learning from other values-aligned fiscal sponsors, we invite you to:
- Watch a recording of the Reimagining Fiscal Sponsorship in Service of Equity session and view the presentation slides
- Download and share the Reimagining Fiscal Sponsorship in Service of Equity report
- Download and share our 6 Ways to Reimagine Fiscal Sponsorship in Service of Equity infographic
- If you would like to share practical tools, documents, links, or event listings with your colleagues related to the content of “Reimagining Fiscal Sponsorship in Service of Equity,” please complete the quick form here; we will collate these to post on the NNFS website.