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Basic FAQ
You can also join our Slack to get in touch with the entire Open Collective community. Check in at the #ocf channel.
Open Collective Foundation is a separate 501(c)(3) entity that uses the platform to provide fiscal hosting services. The two entities are legally completely separate, but they share some of the same staff members and community guidelines.
Individuals and organizations can contribute to your Collective in a variety of ways, including by credit card, bank transfer, and in-kind donations. See Financial Contributions for more information.
A few example focuses include:
- solidarity and mutual aid, community fridges and food justice, community gardens and farms, land justice, time banking, abolition, the solidarity economy,
- humanitarian aid, pandemic response, bail funds, poverty and homelessness, climate justice, environmental justice, civil rights, immigrant rights,
- education, research, labor, the arts, job training, civic engagement, privacy,
- independent journalism, community radio and media, technology, community tech, digital infrastructure, governance,
- and much much more.
OCF supports Collectives to build power within BIPOC, low-income, Womxn, LGBTQIA+, rural, immigrant, and many other other vibrant communities. Feel free to review our Mission and Values, Community Guidelines, and Guiding Principle for more on our approach.
- Provide support to workers who face poverty or hardship (sometimes called "hardship" or "solidarity" funds)
- Help tenants fight evictions (for example, during a pandemic) and other housing justice work
- Educate, advocate, and/or run trainings about labor law in parallel with the work of a union caucus (please see our Political Activity policies for potentially-related information about political activities)
- Organize the labor movement more generally
In order to make clear their distinction from the union itself, Collectives wanting to be hosted by OCF should:
- 1.
- 2.Have a name distinct from the union, which does not include the union's name or the word "union" within it.
- ✅ Hardship Fund for Alpha University Student Workers
- ⛔ Alpha University Workers Union Fund
- 3.Focus their language on supporting workers, removing language about "unionizing" from the "about" section of their profile.
- e.g. "Our group's mission is to support Delta Company's Workers."
- 4.Make clear that the Collective is not controlled by the union.
Additionally, the work must be open-ended in terms of length in order to meet the IRS's requirement of an "indefinite charitable class," meaning that the goal should be to support all striking workers at the organization, not just those striking right now or some specific subset of them. This does not mean that your work must last forever - only that, if you choose, it could. This makes clear to the IRS that you are not out to enrich a finite number of people with your donated funds.
If helpful, consider editing the language on your websites using words and language taken directly from the IRS's definition of "charitable purposes" and "charitable class".
If your application is approved and you want to move from a previous fiscal sponsorship agreement into Open Collective Foundation's hosting:
- 1.Dissolve your previous fiscal sponsorship agreement
- 2.Provide the bank documentation to the previous fiscal sponsor so that they know where to send the money. All the ways of sending money to your Open Collective account can be found here (You can pass this page onto your previous sponsor).
- 3.Inform us that the money is en route [email protected] so that we can check incoming funds and add the funds to your collective upon arrival.
- 4.An additional (less common step) is that we may need to sign a grant transfer agreement if a large amount of funds is coming from an active grant, but that should be initiated by the funder.
Last modified 19h ago