Just months after the Covid pandemic shutdown, two fiscal sponsor colleagues were talking about the government’s new Paycheck Protection Program, its complexity for their field and options for easing some of the anxiety. They moved fast, inviting 85 fiscal sponsors to an online forum to share ideas for negotiating PPP. Sixty people nationwide registered to attend an April 2020 Zoom meeting and 47 showed up. Covid Conversations — later renamed Fiscal Sponsor Conversations — was launched.
In a 2022 Directory story about its genesis, Oliver Hack, Social Good Fund’s director of fiscal sponsorship, recalled that many at that first meeting confirmed their struggles with the PPP. “But some already were diving into the nitty-gritty of the loan, trying to understand even the language used,” he said, and they gladly shared what they were learning.
Hack and fiscal sponsorship consultant Andrew Schulman decided to keep the one-hour, weekly conversations going, expecting that there were scores of topics worth exploring to help participants do their work better.
At meeting No. 200, November 19, 2024, Schulman presented impressive stats: Almost 800 people now are signed up to be notified of upcoming dates and topics. They represent 232 fiscal sponsorship practices in 39 states and from five countries outside the U.S. That’s up from 130 practices in 26 states at the 100th meeting, in June 2022.
Attendance averaged 51 people per session in 2024, a jump from past averages, likely because the sector is feeling a more urgent need for practical, professional support.
“We had our highest attended session ever in April this year — 75 people — when Karl Mill of Mill Law Center talked about proposed new IRS regulations for donor-advised funds”
— Andrew Schulman, Fiscal Sponsorship consultant
There were scores of topics worth exploring to help participants do their work better.
Fifty-two people showed up for 2024’s last meeting, a session on cybersecurity. Other big draws have included expert presenters on how to craft fiscal sponsorship-project agreements, advocacy do’s and don’ts, the history of fiscal sponsorship, the effect of the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ruling on the sector, the process of separating from projects, inclusive recruiting and retention, insurance risks and how insurers view fiscal sponsorship, and much more.
The Conversations’ benefits keep expanding, too. Just four months after the first meeting, Schulman and Hack started a mentorship program, pairing new and established fiscal sponsors for monthly one-hour meet-ups. They’ve made three dozen matches so far.
One was between mentor Dianne Debicella, Senior Director of Programs at Community Partners, and mentee Sarah McCann, Director of Partnerships at Fusion Partnerships. Their Zoom meetings, which began in 2020, continued for two years.
“We started by getting to know each other, our areas of interest and how we each came to be involved in fiscal sponsorship,” says Debicella, who worked at Fractured Atlas for 10 years before transitioning to Community Partners in 2017. “Sarah was somewhat new to fiscal sponsorship, but I felt like we were peers from the start.”
Both women have similar jobs overseeing program effectiveness, and they also have backgrounds in the arts and arts administration that fostered their initial compatibility.
McCann joined Fusion Partnerships in 2020 when, through her community work, she heard about a position opening up there. She recalls that her meetings with Debicella began with discussions about the similarities and differences of their organizations, staff roles and responsibilities, and moved on to specifics challenges as they came up for her.
“What was most important for me,” McCann says, “was discovering that I wasn’t alone. The difficulties of onboarding and offboarding partners and internal system changes are the same.”
Though Debicella and McCann still connect often as friends and colleagues, talking about work and careers, they hadn’t met in person until this year’s National Network of Fiscal Sponsors conference in Atlanta where they co-presented a breakout session called We Do Both! Model A and Model C.
“Most important for me was discovering that I wasn’t alone”
— Sarah McCann, Director of Partnerships, Fusion Partnerships
Debicella has been paired with three other mentees since she answered Schulman’s call for experienced fiscal sponsors to help newcomers. And now McCann, too, has become a mentor, meeting with her first mentee in early December. Like the Conversations themselves, the mentorship program adds one more support for practitioners.
Another extension of the Conversations came last year when Schulman spun off a new service, the Fiscal Sponsor Hub. The site, with both paid and free memberships, has resources, news, group topic-sharing, a place to post project referrals, signups for the mentorship program, and it also hosts the audio recordings and pdf transcripts of all Conversations since No. 1.
Schulman and Hack say they’ll keep the meetings going as long as people show up.
“We assumed from the beginning that people came mostly for the learning,” Schulman says, “but one of my main takeaways is that the community component — spending time with other practitioners and making real connections — is as important as the learning, if not more so.”
Hack echoes that, closing every meeting with a few cheerful, supportive words, reminders of the fraught days of early 2020. ”Stay safe, stay sane, stay positive. We can get through this together.”
Marjorie Beggs, Fiscal Sponsor Directory Manager and Senior Writer and Editor, San Francisco Study Center
Digital Illustration (above,) Lise Stampfli
Four years after its inception during the COVID pandemic, the fiscal sponsorship conversation continues.