Limitations

Using a shared non profit is a bit like sharing a house together. It is very convenient, we can share the burden of doing the admin, but it also comes with limitations.

Every collective is an unincorporated partnership

The All for Climate fiscal host cannot take the legal responsibility of your actions, that would put all the other collectives at risk whenever you do something.

That means that all active members of your collective share the responsibility (like unions).

You cannot hire people (but you can pay freelancers)

You cannot engage the responsibility of the fiscal host, that means that you cannot hire someone, unless you hire a freelancer for a well defined task, for a defined amount of time. Their invoice must be addressed to one of the admins of your collective.

You cannot issue invoices in the name of your collective or All For Climate

Because your collective is not a registered legal entity, the fiscal host cannot be held responsible for your activities. As a result, you are not allowed to issue invoices in the name of All For Climate, since All For Climate did not provide the services — they were delivered by you and your collective.

In addition, you cannot issue invoices under the name of your collective, as it has no legal registration. Doing so would be considered issuing invoices unlawfully.

Finally, please remember that your collective must remain non-profit in nature. Its primary purpose is to support your community and advance shared objectives, not to generate personal or commercial profit.

All for Climate is a not bank

You don't have direct access to your money. There is a well defined process to claim the money (see "How to spend the money on your balance"). It can only be spent to fulfil the mission of your collective (as defined by you, and approved by the admins of your collective), with proper documentation (expense receipt or invoice) and it takes a couple of days to be paid (for the fiscal host to process all the payments).

Think of the fiscal host like someone in your community offering their garage to store material for your project. You don't have the key of the garage but you can access it following some rules set by the owner of the garage to make sure that other groups can also benefit from this storage space. The only difference is that in this case, the All for Climate fiscal host is storing money.

You cannot use the Fiscal Host as a pass-through vehicle.

The goal of All for Climate is to enable unincorporated groups of people to be able to receive and spend money in a transparent way. If your group already has a legal entity, then you don't need All for Climate.

You cannot use All for Climate as a way to channel the money to another legal entity, that would be breaking the promise made to donors that expect an itemized report on how the money is spent.

That's why, we require a much hire level of scrutiny for expenses of more than €1,000. We will usually ask you to break those down to smaller pieces in the interest of transparency whenever possible.

The only exception is when you are closing down your collective. If you still have a balance, you can decide to donate it to All for Climate or to another non profit that is also acting as a fiscal host on Open Collective, or to another non profit that is pursuing the same mission as your collective.