Guide to Fiscal Sponsorship and Affiliation

No One Works Alone

William H. Whyte, Jr., in The Organization Man (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), said that the ideal affiliation limits total involvement in any organization to the minimum necessary for performance of essential functions. The grantseeker must strike the right degree of compromise between the freedom to work on one’s own and the demands placed on one by other individuals and institutions. This compromise may be exemplified in part by the clash between the purity of one’s own ideas versus the possible meddling influence of the funder's own requirements, which eventually may diverge from your own. When the concept of affiliation is initially introduced to the grantseeker, it can be quite frightening. You may immediately conjure up visions of being swallowed up by vast organizational structures and of someone else stealing or taking credit for your ideas. Yet, as an individual grantseeker, it is important that you learn not to view yourself as a victim of current trends in grantmaking. Affiliation with a sponsor need not stifle one’s work but should serve as an adjunct to your attempt to seek funding.

David Riesman, in The Lonely Crowd, Revised edition: A Study of the Changing American Character (Yale University Press, 2001), asserted that an individual's real work — the field into which he or she would like to throw all emotional and creative energies based on his or her own gifts and character — cannot coincide in this day and age with what one gets paid for doing. A response to this assertion is — why not? The individual can stem the tide of collective work by viewing institutional affiliation in the proper circumstances as a positive, rather than a negative, component of grantsmanship.