Learning & Community Building

Social Impact Commons is committed to fostering connections among our Members, building and sharing knowledge, and leading innovation in the field of fiscal sponsorship. Currently, we further these goals through the below activities.

Member Conversations

Through bi-weekly, curated conversations, we engage our Members in shared learning, led by our team, Members, and occasional guest presenters. These conversations are often accompanied by a blog post and/or presentation offering insights and ideas from our work with the field at large. Member Conversations are open to both Individual and Organization Members.

Documentation

In addition to our bog posts, we are constantly creating templates, forms, reports, and documents to guide fiscal sponsorship practice, largely in the context our direct advisory services. We also serve as a platform for our members to share their practices and documents with the broader community. In the spirit of commoning, we share all of our forms and documents royalty-free under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. We share documents presented at our Member meetings with out Individual Members, but have a more robust online collection of forms, templates, and reference documents available to our Organization Members.

Learning Circles

In order to offer opportunities for cohorts of Members to learn together and delve deeper into a particular topic we offer, from time to time, Learning Circles, a practice adapted from the cooperative community. Learning Circles are multi-meeting, co-learning convenings among smaller groups of Members aimed at building a solution together, customizing solutions to participating organizations, or deepening knowledge in a particular aspect of fiscal sponsorship. Learning Circle are open to all Members by subscription, and cost is shared among participants.

Common Impact Initiative

In summer of 2021 we began planning the Common Impact Initiative, a multi-year project dedicated to gathering and disseminating information on the depth, breadth, and impact of the national fiscal sponsorship ecosystem. The Initiative is organized by Social Impact Commons in partnership with the National Network of Fiscal Sponsors.