Fiscal Sponsor Organizations

We require projects to have an advisory body and are flexible about what they call it as long as they do not call it a Board (since that connotes authority the group does not have). We have variations of Advisory Board, Steering Committee, Advisory Council.

Hey there!

Although we do not require the existence of an Advisory Council, we do highly recommend it.

In our Model A contract we refer to the it as the Project Committee which would be an internal committee formed to help manage the day to day operations of the programs.

My two cents. The Project founder (individual or on behalf of an unincorporated nonprofit association) should directly sign the agreement and part of that agreement establishes the general legal role of a Project Committee. You could then have individual members of the Project Committee sing something that says they have read and understood the fiscal sponsorship agreement and will abide by the policies. @Stef Flores posted a somewhat similar question recently and I put some more thoughts there - might be useful… #Steering Committee Agreements #comment

Whitney - Thanks for this question, and echoing the above, being clear about roles and responsibilities of the Advisory Board is more critical than terminology, but it is probably good to avoid using “board”, “director” and/or “trustee” as those generally connote the principal fiduciary role for nonprofits. FS Hub and Impact Commons did make a toolkit on this subject which is free and available here: https://www.socialimpactcommons.org/member-library