Comité Sin Fronteras trains legal observers and runs an ICE hotline for Milwaukee’s immigrant community. Zero Waste Madison has spent nearly a decade helping neighbors build lower-waste habits, one workshop at a time. Healthy School Meals for All WI is working to put free, nutritious meals within reach of every K-12 student in the state.
Powerful organizations like this have a mission, a handful of dedicated people and a community that depends on them. What they often don’t have is the time or expertise to run the back-office systems that keeping any nonprofit alive requires from bookkeeping to compliance to donor management.
That’s the gap fiscal sponsorship exists to close. At Embolden WI, we act as the financial and administrative backbone for dozens of community-driven organizations across the state, handling the paperwork so they can put their full energy into the work itself. We’re not alone in this. The Center for Community Stewardship (C4CS) plays the same role for more than 65 organizations of its own. Between us, we support a wide swath of the grassroots work quietly gathering Wisconsin communities together. And that work is under strain. As federal and foundation dollars tighten, small community groups are often the first to feel it.
Today we’re joining forces for Wisconsin Roots Rising, a 24-hour statewide day of giving that brings together community-driven organizations and programs from both of our networks in a single coordinated campaign. In one place, donors can support a statewide push for free school meals, families living with Parkinson’s disease, a program training service dogs for people with disabilities, a school where neurodivergent and neurotypical youth learn side by side, and teen and young parents building community. It’s a small window into the range of work fiscal sponsorship makes possible.
The logic is simple: One small organization asking its network for donations competes for attention with every other cause in a person’s inbox. In comparison, dozens of organizations asking together, on the same day, with the same energy behind them, cut through in a way no one of them could alone. Collective fundraising days like this also typically bring in a meaningful share of first-time donors, often as many as four in 10, which matters enormously for organizations that are still building the base of support they’ll rely on for years to come.
Wisconsin Roots Rising isn’t just about a single day’s total, though we hope that total is a big one. It’s about visibility for a model of nonprofit work that rarely gets its due. Fiscal sponsorship lets people start doing good in their community without first incorporating, filing for tax-exempt status, and building financial infrastructure from scratch. It lowers the barrier to entry for exactly the kind of close-to-the-ground work that often responds fastest to what a community actually needs.
Today, visit wirootsrising.org and give to an organization whose work speaks to you, whether it’s a cause you already know or one you’re discovering for the first time. If you want to multiply your impact, start your own fundraising page and share it with the people in your life who care about the same things you do; every page reaches donors an organization would never find on its own. And if all you can do is share a post today, that matters too. Attention is its own kind of currency for organizations working without a marketing budget.
Grassroots organizations don’t ask for much, mostly the freedom to keep doing their work without paperwork burying them. Wisconsin Roots Rising is our chance, together, to make sure they can.
Sara Finger is executive director of Embolden WI.
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