Rethink Priorities’ (RP’s) Special Projects (SP) Team is looking for new impactful projects to support in 2025! 

The SP Team supports promising impact-focused projects that we fiscally sponsor, incubate, or launch ourselves. In 2024, we sponsored or incubated seven projects, with a total forecasted expenditure of $6.45M by the end of the year, like Apollo Research or Epoch.

Our goal is to accelerate impactful initiatives by providing comprehensive support services, enabling organizations to focus on their core mission and scale efficiently. Project leaders who worked with us emphasized the team's instrumental role in significantly reducing administrative burdens and enabling organizations to progress efficiently.

How It Works

Our fiscal sponsorship is fee-based and supports projects led by individuals outside of RP. Within this model, the project’s founders maintain autonomy and decision-making authority while we provide them with operational support and fiduciary oversight and share our tax-exempt status. By combining fiscal sponsorship with bespoke operational support, we provide a single solution to all operational needs of new and growing projects. We focus on building out processes, adding systemization, and helping you worry less about things getting missed as you focus on your project's core work.

New organizations generally benefit more from the ‘instant infrastructure’ of fiscal sponsorship and find the limited flexibility of operating within a different organization’s processes and policies less costly. For a new organization already facing a huge amount of other decisions, having some functional structure and process in place quickly and easily can bring a lot of value and expedite a project’s core workstreams. 

More information about fiscal sponsorship and combined operations support can be found here.

Our services provide day-to-day functioning and long-term planning and infrastructure for your project’s operational success and can include:

• Fiscal sponsorship
  • Receiving tax-exempt grant funds
  • Handling tax and legal compliance issues
  • Accounting
• Finance and benefits administration
  • Hiring you and your team as employees [*via our U.S. or U.K. legal entities or our EOR, in compliance with local laws]
  • Managing employee benefits and payroll
  • Invoicing and contracting/purchasing and reimbursements
  • Helping manage your project budget
  • Getting you and your staff work visas in the U.S. or U.K. [we cannot guarantee the outcome of any visa applications, and we would discuss options with you if unsuccessful, etc.]
  • Researching legal and operational issues
• Recruitment/hiring
  • Running hiring rounds for you
  • Develop hiring and interview materials
• Fundraising support
  • Coordinating and reviewing grant applications (please note that we are not able to write your grant applications or speak to funders on your behalf)
  • Managing individual donations from your project’s website
• Other support
  • Supporting goal-setting, performance management, and performance review
  • Providing high-quality resources helpful for upskilling your managers
  • Communication, such as writing newsletters and website copy
  • Writing business plans for entrepreneurial projects
  • Helping to run competitions or requests for proposals
  • Providing ad hoc operational support
  • Managing and/or setting up a CRM system
• Event planning

Projects We Support

For much of this year, we had a team of 4 FTE staff dedicated to operations for Special Projects, and a non-exhaustive list of projects we supported (sorted alphabetically):

• Apollo Research
• Consultants for Impact
• Epoch
• Global Challenges Project
• Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute
• Vista Institute for AI Policy

How To Apply For Support

We will have the capacity to take on more projects from the beginning of 2025. If you need fiscal sponsorship and operational support and have funding or anticipate receiving funding for work that aligns with RP’s mission and vision, we encourage you to send in a new or updated expression of interest via our online form (which should take 5-10 minutes to complete). 

We hope to receive our next tranche of applications by January 6th, 2025, and will follow up with applicants on the next stage of our selection process by January 10th. If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch. We look forward to hearing more about your projects and how working with the Special Projects team could help maximize your impact!

Please note that RP observes a winter break starting December 23rd, and we will not check inboxes again until January 6th.

Testimonials

Working with Rethink Priorities' Special Projects team enabled us to launch our new project far more quickly than we could have on our own. The comprehensive setup saved us significant time and effort, allowing us to focus on our core work.

Chris Akin, COO, Apollo Research

Nearly 90% of our impact over the past year was driven by me being able to full-time dedicate myself to core organizational activities and our capacity to expand the team. Both of these elements were counterfactually made possible by RP’s fiscal sponsorship program. 

Sarah Pomeranz, CEO, Consultants for Impact

The support from the Special Projects team has been instrumental for the development of Epoch. We could not have managed our recent hiring rounds without it, and you have freed hundreds of hours of work that otherwise we would have had to put into operations.

Jamie Sevilla, Director, Epoch

Acknowledgments

This was written by Kieran Greig and Matthew Fargo.

It is a project of Rethink Priorities, a global priority think-and-do tank, aiming to do good at scale. We research pressing opportunities and implement solutions to make the world better. We act upon these opportunities by developing and implementing strategies, projects, and solutions to address key issues. We do this work in close partnership with a variety of organizations including foundations and impact-focused nonprofits. If you're interested in Rethink Priorities' work, please consider subscribing to our newsletter. You can explore our completed public work here.