The power of words - Strengthening fiscal sponsorship through commoning
What are commons and commoning?
A commons is constituted of a defined, but open group of people who actively build and steward (govern) a shared resource for the benefit of the group. “Open” here means that there is some unifying objective or identity to the group, but it remains open to new and additional participants; it’s not closed. So, a commons is very much (if not exactly) like a cooperative. And like cooperatives, pretty much any kind of resource can be “commonized”: land, teams of workers, buildings, technology, money, intellectual property, equipment, natural resources, etc.
Commoning is the activity of stewarding, or governing commons, which is done by the people or “commoners” who benefit from the commons. There is a frequent misconception that a commons is just the resource itself, i.e., the pasture, park, or piece of software. As David Bollier, one of the leading thinkers and advocates for commoning states, “there is no commons without commoning”. It is an active process in which human stewardship and shared values are in many ways more critical than the “resource” in question.
Commoning has three core constituent ideas, as crystalized and asserted by the research and writing of David Bollier and his fellow commoning scholar, Silke Helfrich. These three aspects, the “commoning triad”, as described below and elsewhere on this website, are lightly adapted in terminology and presentation from the work of David and Silke.
Commons Resources: The resources that are being developed and stewarded need to be clearly identified, including how they are cared for (developed), and accessed by beneficiaries, or commoners. For fiscal sponsors, this is being clear about the services and resources we are offering our projects, as well as the financial and other operating and business terms that guide the relationship.
Community & Learning: A thriving commons relies on a commitment to intentional, peer-to-peer learning among commoners, as well as active involvement in developing social ties among constituents. For fiscal sponsors, this concerns how you bring your project teams and staff together to build a sense of community cohesion and collective learning and growth.
Peer Governance: Finally, peer governance can take many forms, but at its core, there is substantial representation by and accountability to the beneficiaries of the commons, not just proxy governance (governance by people not directly participating in the commons). For fiscal sponsors, the degree to which you engage with peer governance relates to how much you're willing to share authority and power with your projects, and most critically, the degree to which your projects participate in governance of your organization, not just their own work.
How does commoning relate to fiscal sponsorship?
Fiscal sponsors, in particular “Model A” practitioners, are essentially managers of cooperatized or commonized resources: management staff, corporate formation, tax status, technology, systems, etc., shared among multiple “projects”. Hence our coinage of management commons as an alternative term for fiscal sponsorship. Though many sponsors likely do not think of themselves in this way, we see a number of benefits to thinking of fiscal sponsorship as commons management, which fall under three broad categories.
Commoning centers the projects and constituents and ways to more equitably share authority and governance responsibility with them. While there are certainly risks to sharing authority with constituents, this issue is at the heart of conversation around equity in our sector. Nonprofits are predominantly white-led and governed. If we want to have a serious conversation about equity and power shifting in the sector, ceding and sharing power with historically marginalized communities is where we need to begin.
Commoning centers the value of social ties and informal networks and can help a community of projects manage through tough times and flourish collectively. It is a perennial challenge of sponsors to facilitate relationships or build community and collaborations intentionally among projects. I would offer that this difficulty may be owing to the frequent dissonance between cultures that are very top-down and transactional and the culture of shared values and intention needed to actually build community. Tighter community bonds and cohesion can help a sponsor navigate growth and change, as well as weather external crises, such as the current pandemic. They can also establish a network of trusted relationships that may better support collaborations that require less facilitation by the sponsor.
Commoning centers relational over transactional or “other-centric” ideas, practices, and language. This idea is not only essential to supporting the above two observations, but can also be the “gateway” to start shifting internal culture and thinking toward a more collaborative and intentional community approach to fiscal sponsorship.
If the recent events in our country have demonstrated anything, it is that words matter and are deeply powerful, a tragi-comic understatement at best. Advocates for commoning practice talk about an “ontological shift” in thinking from a largely private-sector, free-market, and transactional way of viewing the world to one that is more mutual and relational. There is no “us” and “them” (“sponsor” and “project”), there is only “we”. This notion has deep and ancient roots in many non-European cultures, which modern free-market capitalism has largely occluded. Perhaps most notable is the Bantu word “Ubuntu”, which has cognates in many cultures and languages in sub-Saharan Africa, and roughly translates “I am because we are”. In other words, we are all in relationship with each other and have mutual responsibilities and obligations, a notion that is anathema to the radical individualism of contemporary, American neoliberalism.
The power of language.
Part of engaging in such an “onto-shift” (to use Bollier’s term) toward a Ubuntu approach to the world concerns language itself and the intentions and framing words communicate. Seemingly small changes can express dramatically different ideas and relationships. For example, consider the wide use of the word “fee”, as in “fiscal sponsorship fee”. Fee implies a transaction, a quid pro quo, and is a trapping of consumer culture. It immediately positions the sponsors as a “supplier” of resources to the project as “consumer”. While there is a value exchange between sponsor and project, the transactional connotations of fee undermine any sense of we, and reinforce “us” and “them”. We can apply a similar analysis to terms like “client”, “case”, “partner”, and so on.
The absence of focus on relational values and language can quickly form a foundation of mistrust and dysfunction. There are false but persistent perceptions that fiscal sponsorship is just a scheme to extract money (“You’re charging me a fee.”) from projects for little to no value in return. While these perceptions (hopefully) are the result of fiscal sponsorship done badly, the commercial and transactional language that dominates fiscal sponsorship doesn’t help the situation. The extractive and free-market denotations and connotations of language can become particularly amplified and sensitive for project leaders of color, even if the sponsor is BIPOC-led and governed.
So, what’s the alternative? We should consider building and adapting the language of commoning into fiscal sponsorship.
A step forward on the road to a more relational, Ubuntu approach to management commons, may be to reconsider the very language and terms we use. Instead of “fee”, how about “allocation” or “contribution”, both of which lean more toward a cooperative notion of relationship. Instead of “client” or “partner”, how about “member” or “beneficiary”, or even “commoner”? In a commoning universe “competitor” becomes “collaborator”, and “capacity building” becomes “community wealth building” (meant here to apply to more than money). None of these sample comparisons represent an official lexicon of commoning, but are offered to illustrate the very different universe and framework for relationships that mere words can evoke. They can change the conversation, literally.
In closing, we need to acknowledge that the term “fiscal sponsorship” itself is one of the biggest barriers we encounter in advocating our field on a day-to-day basis. What does it really mean? There’s something about money in there (“fiscal”), and “sponsorship” implies some manner of transactional relationship. (Is it charitable or commercial?) It comes across wonky at best and certainly doesn’t capture any sense of values or mutuality in the sponsor-sponsee relationship. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the very name of our field. While certainly not perfect, management commons, to our ears, communicates more of the nuance and nature of our work as stewards of shared capacity and resources for the nonprofit sector.