  |  |  |  |  |  |
Fiscal sponsorship offers benefits to forward-thinking activists and organizations, whether emerging or established. Tides Center projects choose fiscal sponsorship for various reasons, among them:
Fiscal sponsorship from Tides Center provides the space for experimentation, or for projects to accomplish a discrete goal. In comparison to independent nonprofits, our projects find it easier to end once they have accomplished what they set out to do or no longer have revenues sufficient for financial viability. Also, fiscal sponsorship enables inclusive participation in the nonprofit sector for small, grassroots groups, low-income populations or communities of color that may be kept out of the sector for lack of administrative expertise, capital resources, or unfamiliarity with regulations and requirements.
Tides Center's fiscal sponsorship provides access to experts, ensures data reliability, promotes transparency, and advances accountability. We bring disciplined, experienced processes to projects, and make it our job to know the industry's best practices for nonprofit reporting, accounting, grants management, and more. Projects that do not have to spend so much time on back-office administration can focus that time and energy on their programs, resulting in stronger outcomes.
Fiscally sponsored projects share an existing infrastructure for finance, administration, human resources, governance, compliance, and risk management. Projects thus avoid investing precious resources in duplicating this infrastructure.
Fiscal sponsorship from Tides Center utilizes a shared services model in which many organizations leverage a single infrastructure, achieving economies of scale and magnifying the impact of donor investments. Because our projects share our common mission, more resources get directed to building a just, healthy, and sustainable world—and less go to administration and overhead.
Tides Center's fiscal sponsorship services provide the capacity to meet governance and compliance obligations and thus significantly reduce risk. We furnish all projects with comprehensive personnel policies, liability insurance, and forms and training on new government regulations, such as the California Nonprofit Integrity Act, the Patriot Act, and H.R. 4 (the Pension Protection Act of 2006).
Tides Center holds a unique vantage point from which to identify and encourage collaboration and merger opportunities. We create shared learning opportunities to increase cohesion among projects, to disseminate best practices, and to provide a professional development track. We facilitate peer-to-peer learning among our projects with annual gatherings of our projects’ directors.
"We wanted to be able to spend virtually all of our time and mental energy on programs. As long as that proves to be true and we're getting net value out of it in our work with kids, then we'll stick with it."
-- Wendy Lazarus
Executive Director, Children's Partnership, a project of Tides Center
"Applying for nonprofit status is increasingly complex. If you want to try out programmatic areas for a few years, to see if people will support it, it's better to go with an existing organization than to start a new one."
-- Gregory Colvin
Author of Fiscal Sponsorship: 6 Ways to Do It Right
