Reddit reviews Fiscal Sponsorship: 6 Ways to Do It Right

Couple of things:
You'll want to set up an actual organization if you're going to do this big. Although Occupy didn't have an "organization" driving it in a formal sense, there were a lot of anti-globalization/anarchist folks all over the US who provided the infrastructure and experience to make things happen. They had a relatively common workstyle and ideology, this let the movement get off the ground quickly. However, it was , by definition, pretty loose organizationally and that eventually killed the movement.

The good thing is that Restore the Fourth has clear goals. What it needs is better operational skills, especially media outreach. I think in the NYC coverage, I saw TV cameras, so they got that part. There should have been a national press release, pushed to national media. Local groups could have used the national press release as a shell/template for their own releases to local media. Local media is always looking for stories and if you package something up to make it easy, they will come out, especially to protests.


There is going to have to be a national organization. I thought the idea of a national newspaper ad was excellent. Problem is, who will hold the money? When I saw it, I immediately figured the problem was going to be, who is going to buy the ad? If an individual took responsibility for the money, that's endless tax issues. Plus, once you have money involved, things can get tense really fast. Mo' money mo' problems, to quote a famous philosopher. I can say this from direct experience with Occupy.

What might work is to set up a 501(c)4 since those can do political lobbying. That's what we should have done. There's a book called Fiscal Sponsorship that explains how to do it.

There's every reason to set it up as a democratic organization, in terms of decision making and so on. Restore the 4th need something like that to interface with the financial system, buy ads, receive donations, etc.

As far as the permits for marching, that can be good or bad. Some communities (for ex. a lot of undocumented folks) will not participate in nonpermitted marches because they know if they are arrested, they will get deported. There's a time to confront the system directly, and in some cases, that's why doing stuff without a permit can be important, provided you can get community support and not act like assholes. It sounds like Restore the 4th is so far pretty well behaved, probably too well behaved.