About FiscalSponsorship.com

This website has always been intended to be a companion to the structural guidebook Fiscal Sponsorship: 6 Ways To Do It Right, providing a place where information on new developments and best practices could appear between published editions of the book.

It has served that function since the second edition came out in 2005, with occasional postings and free summaries of the essential elements to doing good charitable work in the world through well-managed fiscal sponsorship programs. The print publication of the Third Edition in 2019 offered a complete revision of the Second Edition, and the launch of the eBook in 2025 added a new option for users of the guidebook.

If you don’t have it already, order a copy of Fiscal Sponsorship: 6 Ways To Do It Right, Third Edition, or the eBook. Both are available only from publisher San Francisco Study Center on its Fiscal Sponsor Directory site. The Third Edition features the new Model L (a sponsored limited liability company) and much more detail on successful operation of all the models. The eBook is almost identical to the print version but has the added attraction of easily accessible, linked footnotes.

This website, fiscalsponsorship.com, continues to cover grassroots movements and urgent needs in public health, arts and culture, the natural environment, marginalized communities, overseas grantmaking, and emergent nonprofit innovations — posts on the theory and practice of fiscal sponsorship, some from me and some from guest bloggers. We want to publicize interesting, emerging examples of success in fiscal sponsorship, address common problems and possible solutions, and never stand still.

Tom Silk founded the law firm, now Adler & Colvin, that Greg joined in 1986.

All of us who have worked to pioneer this field remember situations from decades ago when we were called on to promote, engage, and support a well-crafted fiscal sponsorship in order to overcome an obstacle and find a way to serve the greater good.

• Like my mentor, Tom Silk, who founded the nonprofit law firm that I joined in 1986. When the IRS audited his client, Glide Church, an early San Francisco-based fiscal sponsor, Tom succeeded in defending Glide’s conduct of charitable programs through various sponsored projects.
• Like the experience I had in my hometown, Petaluma, Calif., after the kidnapping of my stepson’s classmate Polly Klaas in October 1993. The community responded with an outpouring of donations and in-kind services to the junior high school PTA as a temporary fiscal sponsor to support the search effort. I was able to quickly incorporate the Polly Klaas Foundation and obtain IRS approval of its tax exemption in 11 days, then transfer the project over from the PTA to the new foundation.
  

  Reward poster was distributed after the Oct. 1993 kidnapping of Polly Klaas.

• Like my 1969 experience in Chicago with a Black homebuyer reform movement, the Contract Buyers League. As a Yale Law School student, I did an “intensive semester” working on a federal civil rights case brought by hundreds of Black families that had been grossly overcharged when they purchased homes in formerly white neighborhoods under land-sale contracts instead of mortgages. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a 2014 Atlanticarticle, “The Case for Reparations,” featured the CBL situation as the centerpiece of his argument. This 9-minute video tells CBL’s story. Years after my Chicago experience, writing the first edition of Fiscal Sponsorship: 6 Ways To Do It Right, I realized why an entity called the Gamaliel Foundation had paid the Contract Buyers League’s expenses. CBL did not have its own 501(c)(3) tax status. It was my first experience with fiscal sponsorship.

Greg Colvin
Petaluma, Calif.
Emeritus, Adler & Colvin, San Francisco
August 15, 2025

PHOTOS: Tom Silk founded the law firm, now Adler & Colvin, that Greg joined in 1986. Reward poster was distributed after the Oct. 1993 kidnapping of Polly Klaas.