Hello world!
We’re interalia –a new fiscal host, registered as a non-profit (gGmbH) in Germany. We’re focused on supporting the broad ecosystem of civil society working at the intersection of tech and social justice, by taking care of their operations and finances as they evolve.
We were founded in mid-2024 by Paula Grünwald, Kristina Klein and Zara Rahman, and after almost a year of behind-the-scenes setting up our infrastructure, developing our strategy and building out our processes, we’re excited to launch publicly today.
Why a new fiscal host?
The concept of fiscal hosting is more established in certain areas of the world than others. Here in Germany, it’s relatively unknown – but as we’ve discovered, once we start to explain the concept, people are very quickly on board. (German bureaucracy is notoriously complicated, and we seek to lighten that burden!). As we explore more in our Resources, fiscal hosts in the field of digital rights/internet freedom have struggled over past years, and this has left a number of groups struggling to find an operational home for their work.
In the face of that gap, we all felt like there was more we could do, and through numerous strategy interviews over the past ten months, our initial hunch was validated from many others. We’re aiming to be a reliable, creative and accountable fiscal host who do what we say we will, and do it to a high standard. We also see fiscal hosting as part of a solution to other, intertwined issues within philanthropy and more – which you can read more about in our Strategy.
All of the co-founders of interalia have roots in the digital civil society, so that’s naturally where our networks lie. But we’re keen to broaden our collective understandings of what lies within the tech & society ecosystem, by hosting groups for whom tech plays a minor role, too.
Who funds us?
We’ve been funded over the past year with an initial seed grant from the Open Tech Fund with special thanks to Ramy Roof. Through that grant, we produced a couple of resources that we’re excited to share today:
- Fiscal hosting in the internet freedom space, written by our co-founder, Zara Rahman
- ‘A delicate dance’ –an exploration of feminist fiscal sponsorship –written by independent consultant Rayya El Zein, who we commissioned to produce this piece of work.
We’re also grateful to receive funding from Ford Foundation, Schöpflin Stiftung, and overheads from projects that we host. It’s been demonstrated time and time again that smaller fiscal hosts struggle to cover their core costs solely from overhead –so having core funding helps us to cover our staff costs and internal infrastructure, and also gives us some liquidity to be able to cover groups who might need costs advancing if their grants are late coming in.
How can we help?
If you – as an individual, a formal team or an informal group, are looking to receive funds and need a legal entity to ‘host’ and distribute those funds – let us know. We charge a 10% overhead to partly cover our internal staff costs and infrastructure, and we support you with financial reporting, grants management, and more.
Today, our core team is comprised of Paula Grünwald and Kristina Klein – Zara has moved onto the Advisory Council, along with a stellar line up of experts in this space. (See: Advisory Council.)
If you’d like to learn more about working with us, get in touch on hello[at]interalia.host . We look forward to hearing from you!