CultureTrust Greater Philadelphia

culturetrustphila.org

Do What Drives Your Passion. We've got your back (office).

Over the past decade--and more intensively after the financial crash of 2008--leaders in the nonprofit community have been calling for more collaboration and resource sharing. Much of the focus has been on what is common to all organizations and thus easier to share, namely "back office" administration and other core operating needs that exist behind the curtain: accounting, bill paying, basic insurances, procurement, legal, regulatory compliance, operating best practices, and other critical functions.

CultureTrust Greater Philadelphia is our response to this call.

CultureWorks Greater Philadelphia is a leader in researching and developing models for sharing support resources for arts and culture organizations as well as individual artists, makers, and preservationists. These resources range from shared management staff and office space to charitable corporate structure and status itself. Starting in 2010, we undertook local and national research in both the needs of the cultural community and models for delivering various kinds of shared back office support.

Hands-on experimentation and research led us eventually to the legal structure of Comprehensive Fiscal Sponsorship and to the formation of CultureTrust Greater Philadelphia in October 2013. Comprehensive Fiscal Sponsorship is built around a “co-fiduciary” structure in which we truly manage together with the projects under CultureTrust’s umbrella. We set a common core of polices and best practices that provide the foundation for much more efficient delivery of bundled back office services. The business model is based on a fixed share of revenues (12%), virtually eliminating fixed monthly costs for service and making the program much more sustainable for smaller-scale and episodic cultural work. Costs are only allocated when revenue is generated, allowing for periods of dormancy or reduced activity without interruption of services.

CultureTrust is the first Comprehensive Fiscal Sponsorship program and model of its kind in the country dedicated to the fine and performing arts and heritage and humanities fields.

Note:  The above descriptive information came from the organization's About page.

See Also

• Warrior Writers Project (WWP)
• CultureWorks Greater Philadelphia
• PhilaStories.org