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Grant requests

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Model C Only

This page is providing guidance for Model C projects to request funds for their Raft project. Model A projects have their own Expenses section in this wiki.

If your project would like to give grants to others, see Grant programs.

Preamble

Although much of the guidance in this documentation has a primary audience of Model A projects, our Model C sponsorship practice is an essential part of our mission.

Model C relationships fundamentally differ in that they are structured as distributions from a grantor to a grantee. As a result, the Model C grantee entity holds all of the vendor, contract, insurance, employment, and other external relationships. Raft’s sole relationship is with the grantee.

The grantee, somewhat confusingly, is actually distinct from the fiscally sponsored project. The project is a specific set of charitable purposes and activities, while the grantee is an individual or legal entity that has agreed to carry them out.

All of this amounts to a relationship that is quite different from that of Model A projects, where Raft holds the external relationships, signs contracts, and completely envelops the project. In Model C sponsorship, the relationship is closer to an ongoing partnership - a Venn diagram, not a circle.

Annual reports

At the end of the year, we will seek an updated financial report showing project activities and a narrative report of what was accomplished over the previous year.

Grant requests

Donations to Raft for the purposes of the project are held in what is formally referred to as the “Restricted Fund.” Unlike Model A projects, where invoice expenses are submitted by contractors and vendors, and reimbursement expenses are submitted by workers and volunteers, in Model C sponsorship these expense types are all merged into one, through something called a grant request.

Project purposes

All expenses should be in furtherance of the specific, scoped project purposes stated in the fiscal sponsorship agreement. We cannot cover other business costs of the grantee that are not closely related to the project’s charitable activities for which funds were received.

Submitting your grant request

Go to your Open Collective profile and click “Grant Request.” (Sometimes this is hidden under “Actions.”)

Then make a grant request with your grantee organization as the payee. (Read more about creating your grantee entity in OC below.)

Then make sure to approve the expense as well. This can feel a bit silly, but is necessary for the payment request to show up on our radar.

Info

When a Model C project joins Raft Foundation, we set them up to submit Grant Requests on Open Collective rather than other expense types (along with setting their fee to 8%).

Creating your grantee entity in OC

In Open Collective, to request funds, you will need to create an “Organization” in Open Collective.1 The process is as follows:

  1. Go to https://opencollective.com/signup/organization
  2. Create the organization
  3. Whenever you submit a grant request, set the organization as the payee (you will be prompted to enter payment information the first time you do so)

Documentation

Documentation threshold

Documentation is required for any grant request of $1,000 or more. If the total grant request is below $1,000, we will only request documentation on a case-by-case basis.

When documentation is not required, we ask you to still please create a new line item for each category of expense so that we have some sense of how funds will be used.2

Keep your documentation!

The $1,000 threshold does not relieve grantees of the responsibility to maintain comprehensive expense documentation, in case Raft or its independent auditors request it.

Documents accepted

Through a Grant Request, Model C projects request a payout of funds to cover past and future expenses, and for each expense we can accept a variety of different forms of documentation.

When it comes to invoice expenses from vendors/contractors and receipts3 from staff or the grantee itself, we still have the same standards, but we can also accept other forms of documentation such as: pre-payday payroll reports, screenshots of items to be purchased, and external contracts/agreements.

Partial expenses

If you only have enough funding to cover part of one of your costs, we are happy to accept documentation of the full cost accompanied by a note indicating what portion of the expense you wish for grant funds to cover.

Footnotes

  1. The only exception to this is if the grantee entity is actually an individual - in that case, they would submit the request with themself as the payee. ↩

  2. For example, “contractors” or “software” or “event insurance” (etc.) ↩

  3. Unlike for Model A expenses, it is totally fine to mix up different kinds of expenses - no need to follow the categorization rules described in our standard receipt guidance. ↩

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