Ruby Reyes, the outgoing director of Boston Education Justice Alliance, doesn’t have time to check her bookkeeper’s math.
Recently, for example, she was busy organizing parents, students, and educators to protest the district closing their neighborhood school. Her day was filled with passing out hand warmers, sourcing marshals, and helping parents write testimonials. For Reyes, this is the work of organizing: “It requires investments in people and time and work and emotional labor."
In order to focus on the heart of the work, she entrusted her bookkeeping – and much of the other administrative aspects of the Boston Education Justice Alliance's work – to Movement Sustainability Commons, a fiscal sponsor that includes its sponsored projects in its governing body, the General Circle.
Movement Sustainability Commons (MSC) emerged as a way to weather the whims of philanthropic and city funding. At the time of its founding in 2019, the fiscal sponsor became a way to pool resources among a few surviving youth organizing projects.
Since those early days of survival and mutual support, MSC has evolved into a space where movement leaders and organizers can resource their collective interests and needs. Through the vehicle of fiscal sponsorship, projects share administrative systems – human resources, finance, fundraising, communications, and database systems – while also responding to and engaging with the needs of their movements as a whole.
The former is fairly standard fiscal sponsorship territory. Administrative support plays a big part in helping community organizers focus on what they do best: connecting people closest to issues and building collective power among them.
But the latter – using fiscal sponsorship as a platform to connect and resource broader movements for change – is somewhat unique to MSC.
Resourcing the entire ecosystem is made possible, in part, by the fiscal sponsor’s governance structure. By involving projects in decisions about their collective infrastructure, projects not only shape the offerings they receive from MSC, they do so in service of the shared needs and interests of their fellow sponsored projects.
A model of shared decision making
Movement Sustainability Commons is governed by what it calls the General Circle, the equivalent governing body to a board of directors. The General Circle includes sponsored projects, members of the community, and staff from the fiscal sponsor’s host institutions, Resist, Inc. They vote on key structural and fiduciary decisions: MSC’s annual budget (including staff salaries), whether to take on new projects, and offerings for the whole group, such as leadership development programs and conflict resolution support.
Reyes is a member of the General Circle. One of the many decisions she informs on the General Circle is how to spend extra money in MSC’s annual budget. With these small experimental grants, she and other project directors get a rare opportunity to hold both their individual programmatic goals and the needs and vision of the collective.
This approach to shared governance is rare among fiscal sponsors. Among the hundred fiscal sponsors surveyed in a field scan by Social Impact Commons, barely a quarter report involving their projects in their highest levels of governance. Yet the practice holds enormous promise for knitting together the coalitions that progressive movements most desperately need.
“If I could dream big for the movement, what are the things infrastructure-wise that we could do with these little seed money grants?” Reyes says of the decisions behind projects like MSC’s bookkeeper training program and support for movement grantwriters. “Those projects came out of collective discussions around what infrastructure needs could be built to take items off the plates of organizers and programming folks.”
Fiscal sponsorship as a path to interdependence
The project directors I spoke to highlighted a functional benefit of MSC’s model of shared governance: more responsive and accessible nonprofit infrastructure to organizers who really need this support.
However, Seth Kirshenbaum, MSC’s co-director, hopes that MSC’s approach does more than that. He sees the sharing and the governing of resources as an important break from common nonprofit industry paradigms of isolation, scarcity, and competition.
“Fiscal sponsorship can be a platform and tool that counters the divide-and-conquer strategy of those in power,” says Kirshenbaum. “It offers an opportunity to experiment with interdependence, where we lean on each other, support each other, and are accountable to each other.”
Matahari Women Workers' Center is another sponsored project of Movement Sustainability Commons. Jéssica Oliveira, the project’s co-director, sought fiscal sponsorship with MSC because she was drawn to shared governance as a way to engage with broader movement work.
“We believed in this ecosystem vision and we wanted to participate more actively in the building of the ecosystem,” she says. “And we actually didn't have a lot of opportunities to interface with a lot of fiscally-sponsored groups before joining the General Circle."
Shifting the prevailing practice toward equity
The concept of shared infrastructure and resources that are governed by community organizers and grassroots groups is not unique to MSC, but it’s far from the prevailing practice.
While several reports in the last five years have highlighted the need for fiscal sponsors to better serve people who haven’t had easy access to nonprofit infrastructure – Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant, low-income, disabled, and LGBTQ communities – the field has a long way to go to dismantle power structures that perpetuate a paternalistic and potentially exploitative orientation toward grassroots groups.
For Oliviera, sharing governance simply makes sense if you’re working toward a world where people have a bigger say in the decisions that affect their lives.
“I think it's really helpful that we are making decisions that directly impact us,” says Oliviera. “That feels very aligned to me as an organizer. We're directly impacted by the fiscal sponsorship policies, the offerings. So it makes sense to me that we get to participate in those and have a vote.”
Thaddeus Squire, Chief Commons Steward at Social Impact Commons, agrees that bringing sponsored projects into a fiscal sponsor’s governance is an opportunity for fiscal sponsors to make good on the field’s intentions of equitable access to nonprofit infrastructure. In his view, beyond offering grassroots groups access to much-needed resources, fiscal sponsors who share governance with their projects ensure that the people entrusting their work to them have fair say in how their work is held and managed.
“Many fiscal sponsors are still predominantly white-led and white-governed," Squire says. "Communities of color that are looking at working with them rightly wonder, ‘Why should I hand my resources over to this community that's actually been responsible for a lot of the position we're in right now?’ To participate in the shared infrastructure solution, the impacted communities need to have more control of it.’”
For Reyes, it’s also about a shift that alters the flow of power toward collective and community care and away from exploitation and resource hoarding.
“When you don’t have any money, you have to share what you do have, so in the ecosystem of grassroots groups, we really depend on each other,” Reyes says. “We have to support each other in these really different ways, and we just exist differently.”
This different kind of existence, while rooted in a need to survive in resource-scarce conditions, has pushed MSC to provide more responsive and supportive infrastructure to grassroots groups like BEJA and Matahari. That infrastructure came about from decisions that Reyes and Olivera directly informed, not as individual project directors looking out for their own work, but as agents in a broader ecosystem working for change.
For Kirshenbaum, sharing governance at MSC represents “an experiment in true participatory democracy.” For projects, and the movements they are a part of, it’s a rare but necessary opportunity to make decisions—and move change forward—together, rather than apart.
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