An alternative to the nonprofit model

Stephanie Johnson lobbying at the state Legislature.

Stephanie Johnson’s husband, Rick, passed away in December 2023 after living with Parkinson’s disease for 13 years. Three months later Stephanie was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. The following month she learned that four other people in their former neighborhood on Madison’s southwest side had also been diagnosed with the neurological condition.

“This feels like more than a coincidence,” she recalls thinking. “It might be more of a cluster.”

Johnson, who has worked in healthcare since the early 1990s, reached out to public health officials at the local and state level with her suspicions. She found that no entity in Wisconsin systematically tracks incidents of Parkinson’s and the prevalence of the disease. She then contacted the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, which confirmed there was no Parkinson’s registry in Wisconsin. Johnson decided it was up to her to make that happen.

This is the point when many people, passionate and imbued with a mission, decide to incorporate as a nonprofit organization in order to seek and receive tax-deductible donations and grants in support of their work. Johnson says some people urged her to take that route, but the thought made her sick to her stomach. “The knowledge and understanding of the amount of lift that it would take for a one-woman show…to establish a nonprofit, it didn’t feel like I had the personal bandwidth,” she says, noting she was still in a place of “raw grief” over her husband’s death and her own diagnosis. “I just didn’t have the capacity to do that.”

Instead she explored the option of fiscal sponsorship with Sara Finger, the executive director of Embolden Wisconsin. She learned that Embolden, like many other fiscal sponsors, provides partners much more than a tax status — they can be full-service shops, offering coaching, health benefits, insurance, accounting services, and human resource help.

“Fiscal sponsorship provides shared infrastructure, which reduces duplication, lowers operational costs, and it really gives leaders like Stephanie the room to focus on the communities they are working to serve,” says Finger. Nonprofits, she notes, must have their own board of directors, file their own taxes, and purchase their own insurance.

“And we know how hard it is today to really find the funding and the support to fully support and run a nonprofit. So this is really a force multiplier.”

For two decades Finger ran the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health, which advocated for policies aimed at reducing health disparities; in January 2024 she and others transitioned that organization into Embolden, which supports organizations advancing health equity, health justice and civic health. Finger says the Alliance had successfully incubated programs under its own roof, and determined it could have the most impact by offering organizational support to other groups; it currently sponsors 13 initiatives.

Once partnered with Embolden, Johnson had access to Finger’s legislative experience and communication skills. “Part of this work called for passing legislation to create a registry,” she says. “So Sara’s experience navigating the legislative landscape was really helpful.”

Finger helped Johnson coordinate the timing of the bill’s introduction with the bill’s authors and schedule a press conference to promote the legislation. “I learned a lot fast,” says Johnson.

Thaddeus Squire is the co-found er of Social Impact Commons, a national, nonprofit organization supporting fiscal sponsors.

Squire says fiscal sponsorships date back to the 1950s and 1960s but the field grew quickly following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and a spike in social justice efforts. The worsening crises of climate change and wealth inequality also drove growth. “That supercharged the fiscal sponsorship field,“ he says.

There are about 1,500 fiscal sponsors in the country, compared to about 2 million nonprofits, he notes.

“It’s still a pretty modest part of the sector, but our share is growing probably faster,” he adds.

Tommy Washbush There are two predominant forms of fiscal sponsorship, explains Squire; Under model A, the comprehensive model, a group is “brought fully in-house under the nonprofit in like manner to a program of the nonprofit itself.”

Under model C, programs get mostly the benefit of access to tax-deductible donations through the nonprofit fiscal sponsor, minus an administrative fee.

The Center for Community Stewardship, another Madison-based fiscal sponsor, primarily offers the comprehensive model, as does Embolden.

Founded in 2002 by Bert Stitt to facilitate community conversations, the center became a fiscal sponsor in 2008. The group hired its first executive director in 2017 and now supports more than 50 organizations across the state.

Interim executive director Amanda Jabs says the mission of the center is broad. “It’s to empower community-based organizations to build a more just and equitable society and we do this through fiscal sponsorship, coaching, training and administrative support.”

Jabs, who joined the board of the center while she was still working as a controller for Food Fight Restaurant Group, says the type of nonprofits the center works with is similarly broad — “broad enough to almost be agnostic.” Because the sponsored organizations come under the umbrella of the center’s 501(c)(3), risks must be assessed: “We have a responsibility to make sure these organizations have the funds to pay for their mission.”

The fiscal sponsorship model has recently come under scrutiny. In July, the Fiscal Sponsorship Transparency Act of 2026 was introduced in the House of Representatives. The bill, in general, requires more detailed reporting by fiscal sponsors on their projects and partners.

“There are things we could do to make the charitable sector more accountable and more transparent,” says Squire, who adds that the sector is already “arguably overregulated and transparent,” compared to other areas of the economy.

But he says the legislation, which now appears to be stalled in Congress, is really an effort by the federal government to target charities they don’t like, including reproductive rights groups and Black and brown social justice organizations. “It’s just a pure hit list,” says Squire. “They’re not trying to actually solve a public accountability problem.”

An alternative to the nonprofit model

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