2018 CIIP Program Book CIIP Booklet 2018 | Page 29

Community Partner: Fusion Partnerships
Intern: Rollin Hu
Site Supervisor: Keith Gavazzi
What is Fusion Partnerships?
Through collaborative action, including fiscal sponsorship, Fusion
Partnerships works to be a catalyst for social justice and peace.
A specter is haunting Baltimore — the specter of the nonprofit industrial
complex. Well, there are a whole lot of other things haunting Baltimore but
the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) is the one I learned the most about
while working at Fusion Partnerships. One of the NPIC’s effects is that the
mainstream nonprofits we know and love serve primarily as a tax haven
for plutocrats and are focused more on stroking these plutocrats’ egos for
funding instead of working towards social justice.
Fusion fights against this norm by serving as a fiscal sponsor for organiza-
tions created for and by community members. What that means is Fusion
incorporates these partners into its own 501(c)(3) and handles a wide
range of services like payroll and insurance — things that typically don’t
come to mind when creating a grassroots organization. Fusion’s partners
encompass organizations doing everything from running neighborhood
farms to developing reentry programs for the formerly incarcerated but they
all have the explicit aim of pursuing social justice. That was something that
I learned to understand and then appreciate over the course of this sum-
mer as I learned the complex and problem-ridden nonprofit landscape in
Baltimore.
The people who I worked with had, at times, a tedious and thankless job
where they had to juggle competing interests while staying true to Fusion’s
core values. In the face of issues from the daunting NPIC to having to file
a whole bunch of documents, my coworkers exhibited an amazing level of
patience and love towards the work that they do. Fusion is an organization
unlike any I had worked with before and the people there are models for
the kinds of people I want to work with in the future.
• Centralize and organize Fusion’s nonprofit pro-
gram data and information
• Establish criteria to evaluate Fusion’s partners’
activities and impact
• Write a request for proposals for creating a data-
base of Fusion’s partners’ information
• Contribute to strategic planning meetings about
Fusion’s future
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