A Reflection on ioby’s role as Fiscal Sponsor for Mutual Aid groups during the Covid-19 Pandemic
I’ve had a magnet on my desk and fridge for the last twenty years that reads “When it all goes down, your neighbor will be your first contact.”
So I think about this phrase a lot. What does “when it all goes down” mean?
In the middle of the night during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, a 70-year-old oak tree fell on my parents’ house. It was their neighbors who called the fire department, who helped them out of the house, and made sure they had a place to sleep for the next few weeks.
A natural disaster is a good example of “when it all goes down.”
And Superstorm Sandy is an excellent case study in the importance of local, neighborhood-based, community-based response. After this disaster, residents reported that it was neighbors, not the Red Cross, that were the most reliable resource for response and recovery. (See Thompson, Trevor, Jennifer Benz, Jennifer Agiesta, Kate Cagney, and Michael Meit. “Resilience in the wake of Superstorm Sandy” The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. 2013. )
But as it turns out, neighbors are also the most effective change agents in good times, too! In 2012, the American Planning Association released a report that ranked neighborhood representatives, not environmentalists, professionals, economists, or experts, as the “best types of leaders to understand and implement change.”
So, I guess I might even tweak my magnet to read: “In all situations, your neighbor is your best contact.”
My co-founders, Brandon and Cassie, and I knew this from our lived experience in doing natural resource management research, and so we founded ioby in 2008 with this founding principle: residents know best.
Residents have the most intimate bundle of knowledge about the built environment and the social fabric of the place, making them the most reliable source of innovation and the best equipped to steward change in the long term.
But too often residents are overlooked and underfunded, and this critical context and source of local leadership is lacking. Preference is given to professionals, experts, and institutions who often are outsiders.
So, ioby was created to address this wicked problem: local, deep roots, movement-building groups who are the best source of innovation, most responsive, and best equipped to be long term stewards too often lack the capacity to prove themselves worthy of decision-making power and funding to carry out their visions for their own communities.
We know that resident leaders encounter many barriers to carrying out their visions, and we address some of the most fundamental with four key services: (1) access to funding through our crowdfunding platform, (2) skill-building fundraising training, (3) one-on-one coaching to support seasoned and new civic leaders through bumps in the road, and (4) fiscal sponsorship.
Over the last 13 years ioby has become expert in the needs of what we refer to as the Deep Roots. Deep roots groups lack 501(c)(3) charitable status because they reject that incorporation status, because it’s too cumbersome for the size or scope of the group, or because the group is in an early stage. Deep roots groups are often movement-building groups, highly responsive to community needs, or are self-organized during a disaster. Deep roots groups often are responding to tragedy. Deep roots groups are rooted, they are in and of the community, and they give and receive trust. Deep roots groups are often volunteer led. Deep roots groups are often creating a new model for society through cooperatives (like this one for NYC for-hire drivers, collectives, timebanks, member-owned banks, tool libraries and sharing economies. Deep roots groups often raise 100% of their funding through ioby.
“We are definitely one of the deep roots groups that ioby works with, and a lot of credit is due to ioby for being able to be less rigid when it comes to supporting fledgling programs. If we did not have the flexibility offered us to start immediately an incredible amount of funding and organizing energy would have been almost certainly lost.” -Dmitri D’Alessandro, a member of the 45-person Middletown Mutual Aid Collective that has raised more than $55,000 on ioby.
Given our history working with deep roots groups, it was not a leap for ioby to adapt our services to meet the needs of deep roots groups in 2020 that broke ground in the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic and of the uprising that followed the deaths of George Floyd and too many other Black men, women, and trans people at the hands of police.
As a fiscal sponsor and as a fundraising accelerator, ioby has been uniquely positioned to support hyper-local mutual aid groups to deliver groceries, pantry items, air conditioners, PPE, direct cash assistance, rental assistance, and more.
Elina Malkin of the Pittsburgh Restaurant Workers Association that has raised more than $44,000 since the beginning of the pandemic over the course of four campaigns in 2020, “The guidance ioby has provided has been invaluable. Over the first year of our project, about 50% of our revenue has come from small, community based donations, with a healthy balance between our origin as a grassroots mutual aid group, and support from larger foundations and grants. It’s been critical to our work to learn how to fundraise effectively.” Elina and Kacey McGill, with the Pittsburgh Restaurant Workers Aid PRWA, are currently fundraising for 100 care packages for groceries, baby supplies, pet food and household items.
Looking back at 2020, it is clear that ioby provided very tangible services to the groups we served, and they are:
- Speed, timeliness, ability to raise and disburse funds on time
- Fundraising coaching and one-on-one support
- Flexible fiscal sponsorship, adaptive to the group’s specific needs
- Disbursing funds directly to project leaders
- Light reporting requirements in flexible formats (e.g., “you talk, I type” reporting that we learned from Neighborhood Connections in Cleveland)
- Bridging Deep Roots groups to larger institutions through match funds, facilitating introductions to foundations, and by processing employer-matched gifts
- With ten tri-state area mutual aid groups, ioby piloted additional wrap around services as needed such as sub-bank accounts, disbursing funds at faster frequencies, disbursing funds through different mediums such as debit cards and credit cards, providing legal and tax compliance information on direct cash assistance
“I will say a huge value from ioby has been the fact that we were able to get a crowdfunding [campaign] up on ioby’s website way faster than we could ever get a grant application out. I think we had raised at least $10,000, if not $20,000 on [the ioby] platform before we even turned in our first grant application. And that was back [at the beginning of the pandemic], when the days and weeks really mattered at that crisis moment,” says Frank Fredericks of the Astoria Mutual Aid Network (AMAN) that has raised more than $190,000 on ioby so far.
When we founded ioby in 2008, we believed that preference was given to professionals, consultants, experts, and institutions rather than to community members. We believed the conflict was one of preferencing certified professionalism over lived experience.
But now, with 13 years experience of working adjacent to grassroots grantmaking and strategic philanthropy, I believe that the core issue is not one of preference for one type of expertise for another. Now I understand, through an estimated 7,000+ discussions about how grants are decided, that the reasons why residents are not funded and not allowed to lead decision making is grounded in racism and paternalism.
As evidence, I have developed a very sophisticated graph plotting the difficulty of receiving a grant or gift relative to the dollar amount.
It can be shockingly difficult for a resident to get a $2,000, or even $500 grant, especially compared to how easy it can be for an established nonprofit to get a $1 million grant. At ioby, we know that lack of 501(c)(3) status is just as much a barrier to civic participation as unnecessary paperwork, forms, and grant applications. Why would such small amounts of money require so much compliance and risk management?
At ioby, we do everything possible to right-size the friction of accessing funds to the amount of dollars. The “application” to use ioby is a simple questionnaire, any eligible project can use us (a benefit of ioby not having our own funds to disburse), we raise match funds to meet the needs of the people we serve with as few restrictions as possible, and we send the funds directly to the leader. I have been writing and talking about this since 2013, and still we have encountered zero cases of a resident leader misspending funds.
“During the pandemic we received an emergency response grant for a fairly modest amount of money, much less than we had already raised through crowdfunding. I don’t want to say who it was from, because the intention of the grant was intended to be emergency response, but it was anything but! The paperwork required of us was more than anything I’ve ever seen in my history of being a nonprofit executive director, and because we were fiscally sponsored by ioby, our success strategist did all of it for us. I can’t thank Farrah [ioby’s success strategist who was our personal coach] for sticking with us and holding our hand and helping us. When we sent her that huge stack of paperwork we thought we would be fired from ioby and honestly it would’ve made sense, but we’re here! And we’re here because of Farrah,” shared Frank Fredericks of AMAN.
In addition, it can be nearly impossible for an early stage group to get a first grant in a size any larger than $10,000 because nonprofits need to meet the “public support test”, where at least ⅓ of revenue comes from gifts that are smaller than 2% of the entire budget. Because ioby trains early stage leaders in fundraising from individuals, we can help ensure that groups are well positioned to meet the public support test.
When ioby started making adjustments to how we serve groups, we saw dramatic increases in their first year funding. In 2019, on average our disbursements to deep roots groups were about $8,000, and the largest fiscally-sponsored project on ioby raised about $60,000. In 2020, when we adapted our services to meet the needs of the deep roots groups, the average fiscally-sponsored project disbursement shot up to nearly $100,000, and the largest was $600,000, Bed Stuy Strong, a mutual group in Brooklyn, NY.
With these funds that would have been nearly impossible to get from grants, these groups have had extremely important results. The 4,000-member, volunteer-run, mutual aid group Bed Stuy Strong, for example, has fed 15% of the neighborhood for the last year, distributed air conditioners in summer and coats in winter, PPE for Black Lives Matter protestors, supported a get-out-the-vote effort, vaccines and community clean ups, and much more.
“There’s an ecosystem of aid, you should have large organizations and small groups of all sorts. You need to look at the ecosystem and see what’s missing. If it’s large organizations only, that’s not a resilient philanthropic ecosystem,” explains Angelo Trivisonno, a co-leader of Ohio City-Riverview Covid Care Packages mutual aid in Cleveland, Ohio, that raised more than $8,000 on ioby. “Ohio had one of the earlier stay-at-home covid-19 orders, and the community hoped to help our neighbors down the street at Riverview (many of them seniors) secure essential household and grocery items. We needed to move quickly to purchase supplies and assemble 500 care packages, and we simply didn’t have the time to search for a 501c3 fiscal agent. ioby fit the bill, and their team made it easy to accept and spend donations. Mutual aid orgs should always be supported with as few strings as possible, and ioby did that for us. ioby helped us quickly turn dollars into items that truly made a difference in a time of extreme need.”
A lot of factors make our giving data from 2020 unreliable as a prediction of future results. It was an outlier of a year, for sure. But, I think it’s important to show that with small tweaks to our operations, we were able to support groups to get, on average, ten times the amount of funding support for their work. Last year, ioby disbursed $5.5MM and 40% of that, or $2.2MM, we fiscally sponsored, $1MM of which went to mutual aid groups.
ioby’s evolution as a fiscal sponsor is the result of years of small decisions, step by step, with equity as our goal and at the center of every choice point. What these small steps led us to is a powerful, responsive service designed to put residents at the center of decision making and to get resources to them with as little friction as possible.
“We could have not had the space and time to grow and be successful without your “transactional” prowess on behalf of our communities as well as your very very human-centered love for our team and championship of our work and mission,” shared Emma Osore, BlackSpace Urbanist Collective who has raised more than $135,000 on ioby. For transparency, one of ioby’s Board members Justin Garrett Moore is part of the BlackSpace Urbanist Collective and one of ioby’s senior staff, Jennifer Allen, co-chairs the BlackSpace Board of Directors.
And I’m delighted ioby can serve in this way. As an equity-aligned intermediary, ioby bridges two systems, two cultures, with a singular purpose: to create a future in which our neighborhoods are shaped by the powerful good ideas of our own neighbors.
