Ashgro generally offers what is known as Model A Fiscal sponsorship (also known as “comprehensive fiscal sponsorship” and sometimes referred to as ‘fiscal hosting’ in the UK). Fiscal sponsorship allows projects to receive charitable donations and grants. Legally, a fiscally-sponsored project becomes a project of the sponsoring organization — in this case, Ashgro — and the project lead is hired as an Ashgro employee.

For more detail on fiscal sponsorship, see this in-depth discussion of the benefits and drawbacks.

Some grantmakers — most commonly, donor-advised funds and private foundations — require their grants to go to 501(c)(3) organizations that are classified as public charities. You can set up a legal charity, but this is complex, expensive and time-consuming. It’s often not worth it for time-limited or small projects. Being fiscally sponsored means that your project can access funding from donor-advised funds (and other charity-specific funds) without you having to set up your own entity.

To fund Ashgro’s operations, we’ll charge you a percentage of the funding we receive for each project. We have a tiered fee structure that typically ranges from 5%-10% of total project revenue depending on factors such as the size of the project, number of employees, and relative complexity of the project purposes. For more information, get in touch.

You might be a good fit for fiscal sponsorship with Ashgro if your project is:

• funded primarily through charitable donations or grants

• focused on AI safety

• too small to set up and manage your own charitable entity

• temporary, or potentially temporary

For example, you might be a strong candidate if you’re an independent technical AI safety researcher who’s received a grant, or if you lead a new 5-person organization doing research into AI policy.

If you’re unsure whether your project would be a good fit, get in touch.

Since our fiscally-sponsored projects need to follow 501(c)(3) rules, we can’t support candidates for elective office (e.g. a campaign to elect a particular US congressperson who intends to lobby for AI safety measures). We are also limited in how much we can devote to efforts to influence legislation (e.g., publishing a paper in support of proposed AI Safety legislation), but we can support projects working on non-partisan policy or non-partisan research, study, and analysis.

We’re a US organization, but we can work with projects based in most countries.

As part of our services, we handle all the accounting, legal, and tax compliance so you are free to conduct the project.

We also offer a project portal where project leads can easily check how much funding they have left, without tiresome emailing back and forth.

Section 501(c)(3) organizations are tax-exempt on most of their income and provide an income tax deduction for donors — that is, your donors may be entitled to a tax deduction on the money they donate, which may make your project more attractive. However, fiscal sponsorship doesn’t make the project lead(s) and employees tax-exempt: you’ll still have to pay normal income tax on your salary.

Yes: Ashgro Inc. is incorporated in Delaware, so it is a Delaware nonprofit corporation. Ashgro is also tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the United States tax code and classified as a public charity under Section 509(a)(1).

The Ashgro operations team is mainly funded by charging a percentage of the grants and donations that Ashgro received for its fiscally sponsored projects. If you’d like to support us, you can donate here.

Ashgro's annual reporting documents for 501(c)(3) are available at Guidestar.

For any other documents, please contact us.