Hello! If you are receiving this email, it is because you are a Project Lead for one of Raft Foundation’s fiscally-sponsored projects. 

Moving forward, once per month (in the latter part of the month) we will send out this Bulletin with important updates, operational notes, announcements, and to welcome new projects. We will aim keep it brief - although in this first edition, the list of “new” projects will be a bit longer than usual. 

The outline of this email is as follows:

1. Seasonal check-in

2. Process improvements and documentation updates

3. The initial cohort + getting to know each other (including “Introducing yourself” and “Pairing you up”)

4. Operational notes

5. Seeking input: collaborative grant applications

Seasonal check-in

With the passing of the Summer Solstice, we are also launching our first round of seasonal check-ins. Please submit a short report with what you’ve been up to, in whatever format is most comfortable for you. 

These reports will be shared internally with the other Raft projects - read all about the process in our documentation.

Process improvements and documentation updates

• Updated the process for check donations, so that rather than mailing them to Nathan’s house, we instead set you up to deposit them yourself (we can still also deposit them ourselves, though with a delay) - read more about check donations here

• Created a new Expense checklist page, which includes a list of expenses that we cannot pay

• Added a section on event insurance to the Events page, with a list of times where event insurance is required

• Made these other additions/updates to the documentation: Grant applications, Donor-advised fund (DAF), corporate giving, and employee matching donations, Whistleblower policy, Transferring to Raft from another Open Collective fiscal host

Reminder - the password for the member documentation is currently “themany”

The initial cohort + getting to know each other

We are happy to introduce the opening line-up of fiscally-sponsored projects at Raft Foundation: 

• E2C Collective is a Model A project that joined Raft in September 2024 aiming to advance the framework of "exit to community"—enabling startups to become owned and governed by their communities—and to put the E2C vision into practice in its own community

• AT Protocol Community Fund is a Model A project that joined Raft in January 2025 aiming to support shared compute infrastructure, open source code development, design, and documentation, and larger community initiatives like conferences - to pool funds and collaboration with commons infrastructure

• DWeb Projects is a Model C project that joined Raft in January 2025 aiming to connect people, projects, and protocols to build a decentralized web

• Coffee Workers Coalition is a Model A project that joined Raft in March 2025 aiming to cultivate a mutual aid network for coffee workers that builds solidarity, exchanges organizing notes, and raises and distributes funds to workers experiencing hardship

• Unbreaking is a Model A project that joined Raft in April 2025 aiming to help ordinary people to build a durable understanding of key government actions and their effects, and to build a sense of their own agency, through the compilation and contextualization of publicly-sourced information on the issues they care about

• The Maintainers is a Model A project that joined Raft in April 2025 aiming to advance maintenance, repair, and care, centering the myriad forms of labor, expertise, and infrastructure that sustain our human built world

• Socialroots Projects is a Model C project that joined Raft in April 2025 aiming to support coalitions and associations who are resource sharing to better coordinate across a network and enable cross-group coordination at scale

• CivicBand is a Model A project that joined Raft in April 2025 aiming to build a tool that enables citizens, activists, journalists, and anyone else that cares about regional issues and holding elected officials to account by allowing them to search a database of records and meeting minutes from more than 630 municipalities across North America

• M 25 is a Model A project that joined Raft in May 2025 aiming to increase material access (i.e., to reproductive and sexual health products, food, and basic needs) for Middle Georgia residents, especially those in the cities of Byron, Centerville, Perry, and Warner Robins

• Minneapolis Northside Mutual Aid is a Model A project that joined Raft in May 2025 aiming to foster a network of housed and unhoused neighbors supporting each other with masks, meals, heat, and hope

• Gertrude Brown Community Land Trust is a Model A project that joined Raft in May 2025 aiming to create a community of micro-homes in Minneapolis that are deeply affordable for unhoused people to create an autonomous community

• DeepMay is a Model A project that joined Raft in May 2025 aiming to teach community organizers the technology skills necessary for their continued success and safety

• OpenTEAM is a Model A project that joined Raft in June 2025 aiming to build a supportive community and technology ecosystem for agriculture and soil health through interoperable tools for land stewards in order to catalyze transformation in agriculture and global systems science

• Synapset Teacher Mental Health Fund is a Model C project that joined Raft in May 2025 aiming to identify, fund, and accelerate educator-led solutions addressing the mental health crisis in schools, in the belief that mentally healthy teachers are essential to thriving schools and to the success and well-being of the students they serve

• Black Ideas Collaborative is a Model A project that joined Raft in June 2025 aiming to invest in the everyday brilliance of the African Diaspora as we work to envision, design and build democratic community systems

• DWeb Camp Cascadia is a Model A project that joined Raft in June 2025 aiming to organize a collaborative gathering for the DWeb community

We are delighted to have all of you with us - and a few more will be signing up over the next month.

Introduce yourself

We have set up an online forum for all of you to connect with one another: RaftTalk. There isn’t much in there yet, but feel free to use this invite link to join and introduce yourself in the intros thread. Stay tuned for future plans in this space!

Pairing you up

In an effort to cultivate connections between project leaders, next month we will randomly you up with another individual project lead, via email. We will not track whether or not you meet to get to know each other - but we would love it if you did. 

We plan to do this once per season. Please let us know if you want to opt out, either for this first round or for all of them moving forward.

Operational notes

1. As of June 1, the Member Fund balance sits at $899.21. We will wait for it to grow a bit more before engaging in our first participatory budgeting process.

2. Nathan has now closed out his last non-Raft consulting contract, and is fully focused (if not working full-time) on Raft, several months earlier than anticipated. He plans to shift to full-time work over the next several months, with the further goal of bringing on a part-time staff member within the next 6-9 months.

3. We have done away with the $150 onboarding fee - we never ended up charging it, except once, which has been refunded. It just didn’t feel right.

4. For Model A projects: general liability insurance “endorsements” - i.e., the documents that show the cost of each project being added to our insurance - have yet to be completed. This is due to our nonprofit insurance provider - which is a charity itself - having to work through a large backlog. Rest assured that the effective date of the insurance goes back to when we added you as a project. But as soon as these endorsements come in, you will see a charge for the insurance, usually at or below $300, and if you do not have enough funds in your account, we will initiate a conversation about delaying the charge.

5. We started tagging our expenses on our Open Collective profile so you can see from a bird’s eye view how we are spending our funds

6. If you would like to include an announcement in a future monthly bulletin, please send us an email and we will be happy to include it.

Seeking input: collaborative grant applications

A project lead has suggested that we ask all of you to tell us which grant opportunities you will apply for in advance, so that when multiple Raft projects intend to apply for the same opportunity, they can collaborate, either in their messaging to the funder or by actually collaborating on a single application. 

The suggestion comes from someone that has, up until now, mostly operated in Europe, where fiscal sponsorship (or fiscal hosting) is lesser-known. In the US, many funders are used to multiple applications coming in from the same organization, whereas in Europe, there are sometimes rules about only providing a single grant per organization.

Whether or not it is feasible to combine applications probably depends a lot on the specifics of grant and the projects involved. That said, perhaps collaborating on grant applications could also be an opportunity? Might we be able to - in some cases - craft a stronger pitch by showing a multifaceted approach involving multiple projects?  

We are seeking your thoughts. If we were to implement this, you would need to tell us as soon as you began working on an application, which is earlier than what we currently require. Is that too much to ask? Reply to this message with your take!

~

Thanks for reading! Email us at team@raft.foundation with any questions. 

Warmly,

Nathan