Fiscal sponsor
A tax-exempt organisation that receives and administers a grant on behalf of a project without exempt status of its own. It is an arrangement between an applicant and a sponsor, which makes it a fact about the applicant and never a field on an opportunity.
Part of the GrantTrove grant funding glossary — one entry for every field the catalogue stores.
Also called Fiscal sponsorship · Fiscal agent
In detail
Sponsorship is the standard route for a new project, a coalition, or an individual whose work needs a 501(c)(3) applicant behind it. The sponsor is the legal recipient: it signs, it is accountable for the money, and it usually charges a percentage for carrying that.
What sponsorship does not do is change what a notice says. A programme open to nonprofits is open to the sponsor as applicant; whether the sponsored project is the thing the programme meant to fund is a question a programme officer answers, not one an eligibility list answers.
Against eligibility
`elig_entity_types` records the applicant classes a notice names — the values shown on a record as “Eligible entities”. A sponsorship arrangement is not one of those classes, and we never widen an eligibility list to cover an arrangement the notice did not mention. A programme that lists “Nonprofit” has not thereby said it accepts sponsored projects.
How GrantTrove stores it
- Eligibility values on a record are the source’s own, mapped into our vocabulary only where a mapping is honest. Where a source category has no honest home it stays unmapped rather than being forced into the nearest one: a wrong mapping puts a record in front of someone it does not fit.
- Where a notice says nothing about who may apply, the record reads Not stated rather than listing every type it did not rule out.
Common questions
Can I apply through a fiscal sponsor?
That is between you, the sponsor and the programme. The record cannot tell you; the notice and the programme officer can.
Do you list fiscal sponsors?
No. We hold funders and opportunities. A sponsor appears here only if it is itself a grantmaker we track.
Does my sponsor’s status make my project eligible?
It makes the sponsor the applicant. Whether the programme wants to fund the underlying project is a separate question, and the eligibility field does not answer it.