Two of the biggest questions for me are whether or not Nonlinear had a board of directors when Alice and Chloe worked for them and, if they did, whether an employee would know the identities and contact information of the board members and could feel reasonably safe approaching board members to express concerns and seek intervention. I can’t find evidence they had a board at the time of the complaints or do now a year and a half after Alice and Chloe stopped working with them. The only reference to a board of directors I see in the Google Doc is Lightcone’s board, which seems telling on a few levels.
Nonprofit boards are tasked with ensuring legal compliance, including compliance with relevant employment law considerations, and including above board practices in unconventional and riskier structures like Nonlinear chose to operate through. This situation looks very different if a legitimate board is in place than if employees don’t have that safeguard.
Though I’m sad about the hurt experienced by many people across the Nonlinear situation, I’m personally less concerned with the minutiae of this particular organization and more about what structures, norms, and safeguards can be established across the EA ecosystem as a whole to reduce risk and protect EA community members going forward. Boards and institutional oversight are a recurring theme, from FTX to Nonlinear (to maybe OpenAI?) and I’m personally more skeptical of any organization that does not make its board information readily apparent.
It seems that at least during the relevant period, Nonlinear was at least partially fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity. Rethink Charity’s board is, I think, based on this blog post from 2019:
Kalista Barter
Travis Cooper
Ozzie Gooen
Alexander Gordon-Brown
I don’t know what fraction of Nonlinear’s operations were fiscally sponsored by Rethink, and I feel kind of embarrassed for just noticing this now (I found out by looking at the grants made in the 2022-H1 Survival and Flourishing Funds grant round). I think talking to the Rethink Board would have been a great thing to do in this whole situation, I just totally missed this.
Update: Pinging Ozzie on that list, it seems Rethink Charity ceased operations in the U.S. and its board is therefore no longer active. It was however active during the central period our investigation covered. I might see whether I can get takes from the old board members, but it seems like there is no longer an active board.
Leaving trace of previous comment: Oh, huh, I didn’t realize this, but I think a good chunk of Nonlinear’s activities might be fiscally sponsored by Rethink Priorities, which would make the following people Nonlinear’s board:
Nonlinear is not, and has never been fiscally sponsored by Rethink Priorities. RP has never had a legal or financial connection to Nonlinear.
In the grant round you cite, it looks like the receiving charity is listed as Rethink Charity. RP was fiscally sponsored by RC until 2020, but is no longer legally connected to RC. RC is a separate legal entity with a separate board. RP and RC do not have a legal connection anymore, and have not since 2020.
@abrahamrowe, I’m curious if you have insights on the larger point about good governance across the EA ecosystem. As evidenced by EV’s planned disbanding, sponsorship arrangements have a higher potential to become fraught. The opacity of the relationship between Rethink Charity and Nonlinear might be another example. (I.e. This is further indication Nonlinear employees wouldn’t have had the same protection and recourse mechanisms as employees of more conventionally governed 501c3s, especially those of established 501c3s sizeable enough to hire 21 staff members.) Given RP is growing into one of the larger fiscal sponsors through your Special Projects Team, it might be worth further commentary from the RP team on how you’re navigating risk and responsibility in sponsorship arrangements. Given RP’s track record of proactive risk mitigation, I imagine you all have given this ample thought and it might serve as a template for others.
I do think that’s a reasonable question, but given that Rethink Priorities has indeed never sponsored Nonlinear (and it was just Rethink Charity), I do think that can happen in a different thread, or feels a bit off-topic for this discussion.
Edited to remove my comment since it is off topic. I’m happy to talk about this though if people want to in other contexts! I definitely think this is a pretty important question, and looking into how fiscal sponsorship arrangements are working in reality is important, as I imagine there is high variance in how effective oversight mechanisms are (though I think RP has done this well).
Hey just some notes on how nonprofit fiscal sponsorship stuff works (I have worked in ops for charities for a while now) --
Not sure if the grant acceptance was your only evidence, but the fact that RC was the receiving charity for a grant in 2022 doesn’t necessarily mean they are fiscally sponsoring Nonlinear (or were at the time). I can think of a few reasons related to bank set up times, international transactions, etc. that a charity might ask another charity to receive the grant for them, although it is a bit weird.
If RC is the fiscal sponsor, it looks like most of RC’s fiscal sponsorship projects are Model C. There are a bunch of different fiscal sponsorship models with different implications for the relationship. Model C means they are basically just a pass-through for funds, so Nonlinear would have had to have its own governance board, if one exists.
Depending on what exactly Nonlinear is, from a legal perspective, it may not have a board. As far as I can tell, they have no information about their corporate structure on their website; they list several “advisors” but that doesn’t seem to be a governance board. If Nonlinear doesn’t have a board, that reflects somewhat poorly on the due diligence of RC’s regranting, but explains why the employees might not have had anyone to complain to.
A google searchreveals that Spartz Philanthropies had it’s nonprofit status revoked by the IRS for failing to file their tax documents for 3 consecutive years. So it seems unlikely that they’re doing formal fiscal sponsorship through that group either.
SoonKhen, the former Executive Director of Rethink Charity USA here.
I can confirm that Nonlinear was previously fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity under a Model C sponsorship. A Model C fiscal sponsorship functions more like a grantor-grantee relationship; more information about it can be found here. In Model C sponsorships, the projects fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity were not projects of Rethink Charity itself, but rather belonged to the fiscal sponsees. Our responsibilities included accepting grants and, according to the agreement and project budget, disbursing grants to sponsees, as well as monitoring their progress through reports they submitted. The board of Rethink Charity was not the board of Nonlinear.
As I mentioned, I did ping Ozzie. He did confirm that RC provided fiscal sponsorship (and more recently since I posted my comment also brought up the model C sponsorship). I was also involved in that SFF round and so could confirm that Nonlinear was using RC as a fiscal sponsor and not just a passthrough entity.
Sorry for confusing Rethink Priorities and Rethink Charity before I edited it, but it still seems really relevant and a direct answer to the question at hand that Nonlinear was indeed fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity, and people seem to keep downvoting it, which makes no sense IMO.
I think it’s bad to repeatedly accuse people of things they didn’t do, or having responsibilities they didn’t have, and then write “Oops, sorry!”, and we should do less of this.
You could have easily checked in with them, as with Macaskill last time, so that RP didn’t have to rush in immediately with a correction, since otherwise way fewer people will see the correction than the original claim/accusation (if any). It lowers this forum’s epistemics, wastes people’s time, and stains accused people’s reputation for no reason.
The tradeoff between writing a claim instantly or spending some time to confirm its correctness usually favours the latter. If I were on the board of RP, having my name on this thread could be damaging, and I would feel lucky that it got corrected immediately. I downvoted because I want to see fewer comments like that.
Just for context, I posted this comment after I messaged a Rethink board member who told me:
“So the Rethink Board delegates authority to govern non-linear to a specific sub-board. I’ll find out who is on that sub-board.”
I really feel like given that response, I sure felt justified in my epistemic state that Rethink Priorities was indeed the appropriate organization. It turned out to be a miscommunication, which is unfortunate, but I did actually try to confirm this before posting.
You messaged a ‘Rethink’ board member as in a Rethink Priorities board member or a Rethink Charity board member? They seem to have fully disjoint boards.
(That these are both “Rethink” while independent is not great branding, and I think they should expect continued confusion until one of them renames.)
EDIT: I see below you say you talked to Niel of RP, so it sounds like he was just wrong in his response to you?
Yeah, Rethink Priorities, and yeah he was just wrong, which confused me. To be clear, I don’t think this was his fault, I asked the question in a kind of leading way, and he responded very quickly, and so I model this more as an unfortunate miscommunication.
I just got very excited and posted immediately because I thought that maybe there would be some way out of this that doesn’t primarily route through the court of public opinion which my guess was everyone would appreciate.
Yeah, Rethink Priorities, and yeah he was just wrong, which confused me. To be clear, I don’t think this was his fault, I asked the question in a kind of leading way, and he responded very quickly, and so I model this more as an unfortunate miscommunication.
Confirming that I was wrong about this in my communication with Oli. Also agreeing with Oli here on the context in which those comments were made.
I have made a note in my reflective journal entry on this event to be more careful with my comms in circumstances such as this one.
That’s rough! It sounds like you did the right thing (checking with an RP board member before saying NL was under RP) and then the harsh response was because others couldn’t tell you’d done the right thing.
My guess is if you had posted a second comment with the true information people would have downvoted the first incorrect one, upvoted the second, and the net would be negative (because people are very averse to false information being shared).
I feel like I shared very relevant information in either case, and IMO it feels like a reasonable mistake to make to think that Rethink Charity is the same as Rethink Priorities, given that they were indeed the same organization in the past.
I also messaged Niel from the Rethink board who himself said to me things that sounded like it confirmed that Nonlinear was fiscally sponsored (happy to share the text in DMs), so I feel like my epistemic state was really quite reasonable.
Once again, where is the board?
Two of the biggest questions for me are whether or not Nonlinear had a board of directors when Alice and Chloe worked for them and, if they did, whether an employee would know the identities and contact information of the board members and could feel reasonably safe approaching board members to express concerns and seek intervention. I can’t find evidence they had a board at the time of the complaints or do now a year and a half after Alice and Chloe stopped working with them. The only reference to a board of directors I see in the Google Doc is Lightcone’s board, which seems telling on a few levels.
Nonprofit boards are tasked with ensuring legal compliance, including compliance with relevant employment law considerations, and including above board practices in unconventional and riskier structures like Nonlinear chose to operate through. This situation looks very different if a legitimate board is in place than if employees don’t have that safeguard.
Though I’m sad about the hurt experienced by many people across the Nonlinear situation, I’m personally less concerned with the minutiae of this particular organization and more about what structures, norms, and safeguards can be established across the EA ecosystem as a whole to reduce risk and protect EA community members going forward. Boards and institutional oversight are a recurring theme, from FTX to Nonlinear (to maybe OpenAI?) and I’m personally more skeptical of any organization that does not make its board information readily apparent.
Yes, I’ve been wondering who’s on Nonlinear’s board for the better part of a year!
It seems that at least during the relevant period, Nonlinear was at least partially fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity. Rethink Charity’s board is, I think, based on this blog post from 2019:
I don’t know what fraction of Nonlinear’s operations were fiscally sponsored by Rethink, and I feel kind of embarrassed for just noticing this now (I found out by looking at the grants made in the 2022-H1 Survival and Flourishing Funds grant round). I think talking to the Rethink Board would have been a great thing to do in this whole situation, I just totally missed this.
Update: Pinging Ozzie on that list, it seems Rethink Charity ceased operations in the U.S. and its board is therefore no longer active. It was however active during the central period our investigation covered. I might see whether I can get takes from the old board members, but it seems like there is no longer an active board.
Leaving trace of previous comment: Oh, huh, I didn’t realize this, but I think a good chunk of Nonlinear’s activities might be fiscally sponsored by Rethink Priorities, which would make the following people Nonlinear’s board:Hi,
(writing as the COO of Rethink Priorities).
Nonlinear is not, and has never been fiscally sponsored by Rethink Priorities. RP has never had a legal or financial connection to Nonlinear.
In the grant round you cite, it looks like the receiving charity is listed as Rethink Charity. RP was fiscally sponsored by RC until 2020, but is no longer legally connected to RC. RC is a separate legal entity with a separate board. RP and RC do not have a legal connection anymore, and have not since 2020.
Oops, sorry! I did indeed think that you were still part of the same legal structure!
Correcting myself, then I guess the following is Nonlinear’s board (the board of Rethink Charity)?
Will also update my other comment to correct for this.
@abrahamrowe, I’m curious if you have insights on the larger point about good governance across the EA ecosystem. As evidenced by EV’s planned disbanding, sponsorship arrangements have a higher potential to become fraught. The opacity of the relationship between Rethink Charity and Nonlinear might be another example. (I.e. This is further indication Nonlinear employees wouldn’t have had the same protection and recourse mechanisms as employees of more conventionally governed 501c3s, especially those of established 501c3s sizeable enough to hire 21 staff members.) Given RP is growing into one of the larger fiscal sponsors through your Special Projects Team, it might be worth further commentary from the RP team on how you’re navigating risk and responsibility in sponsorship arrangements. Given RP’s track record of proactive risk mitigation, I imagine you all have given this ample thought and it might serve as a template for others.
I do think that’s a reasonable question, but given that Rethink Priorities has indeed never sponsored Nonlinear (and it was just Rethink Charity), I do think that can happen in a different thread, or feels a bit off-topic for this discussion.
Edited to remove my comment since it is off topic. I’m happy to talk about this though if people want to in other contexts! I definitely think this is a pretty important question, and looking into how fiscal sponsorship arrangements are working in reality is important, as I imagine there is high variance in how effective oversight mechanisms are (though I think RP has done this well).
Hey just some notes on how nonprofit fiscal sponsorship stuff works (I have worked in ops for charities for a while now) --
Not sure if the grant acceptance was your only evidence, but the fact that RC was the receiving charity for a grant in 2022 doesn’t necessarily mean they are fiscally sponsoring Nonlinear (or were at the time). I can think of a few reasons related to bank set up times, international transactions, etc. that a charity might ask another charity to receive the grant for them, although it is a bit weird.
If RC is the fiscal sponsor, it looks like most of RC’s fiscal sponsorship projects are Model C. There are a bunch of different fiscal sponsorship models with different implications for the relationship. Model C means they are basically just a pass-through for funds, so Nonlinear would have had to have its own governance board, if one exists.
Depending on what exactly Nonlinear is, from a legal perspective, it may not have a board. As far as I can tell, they have no information about their corporate structure on their website; they list several “advisors” but that doesn’t seem to be a governance board. If Nonlinear doesn’t have a board, that reflects somewhat poorly on the due diligence of RC’s regranting, but explains why the employees might not have had anyone to complain to.
A google searchreveals that Spartz Philanthropies had it’s nonprofit status revoked by the IRS for failing to file their tax documents for 3 consecutive years. So it seems unlikely that they’re doing formal fiscal sponsorship through that group either.
Hi there,
SoonKhen, the former Executive Director of Rethink Charity USA here.
I can confirm that Nonlinear was previously fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity under a Model C sponsorship. A Model C fiscal sponsorship functions more like a grantor-grantee relationship; more information about it can be found here. In Model C sponsorships, the projects fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity were not projects of Rethink Charity itself, but rather belonged to the fiscal sponsees. Our responsibilities included accepting grants and, according to the agreement and project budget, disbursing grants to sponsees, as well as monitoring their progress through reports they submitted. The board of Rethink Charity was not the board of Nonlinear.
(There appears to be a link missing)
Sorry Habryka! Can’t believe I missed it. I’ve added the link above.
As I mentioned, I did ping Ozzie. He did confirm that RC provided fiscal sponsorship (and more recently since I posted my comment also brought up the model C sponsorship). I was also involved in that SFF round and so could confirm that Nonlinear was using RC as a fiscal sponsor and not just a passthrough entity.
Appreciate the other info.
Ok, what is the crazy downvoting going on here?
Sorry for confusing Rethink Priorities and Rethink Charity before I edited it, but it still seems really relevant and a direct answer to the question at hand that Nonlinear was indeed fiscally sponsored by Rethink Charity, and people seem to keep downvoting it, which makes no sense IMO.
I think it’s bad to repeatedly accuse people of things they didn’t do, or having responsibilities they didn’t have, and then write “Oops, sorry!”, and we should do less of this.
You could have easily checked in with them, as with Macaskill last time, so that RP didn’t have to rush in immediately with a correction, since otherwise way fewer people will see the correction than the original claim/accusation (if any). It lowers this forum’s epistemics, wastes people’s time, and stains accused people’s reputation for no reason.
The tradeoff between writing a claim instantly or spending some time to confirm its correctness usually favours the latter. If I were on the board of RP, having my name on this thread could be damaging, and I would feel lucky that it got corrected immediately. I downvoted because I want to see fewer comments like that.
Just for context, I posted this comment after I messaged a Rethink board member who told me:
“So the Rethink Board delegates authority to govern non-linear to a specific sub-board. I’ll find out who is on that sub-board.”
I really feel like given that response, I sure felt justified in my epistemic state that Rethink Priorities was indeed the appropriate organization. It turned out to be a miscommunication, which is unfortunate, but I did actually try to confirm this before posting.
You messaged a ‘Rethink’ board member as in a Rethink Priorities board member or a Rethink Charity board member? They seem to have fully disjoint boards.
(That these are both “Rethink” while independent is not great branding, and I think they should expect continued confusion until one of them renames.)
EDIT: I see below you say you talked to Niel of RP, so it sounds like he was just wrong in his response to you?
Yeah, Rethink Priorities, and yeah he was just wrong, which confused me. To be clear, I don’t think this was his fault, I asked the question in a kind of leading way, and he responded very quickly, and so I model this more as an unfortunate miscommunication.
I just got very excited and posted immediately because I thought that maybe there would be some way out of this that doesn’t primarily route through the court of public opinion which my guess was everyone would appreciate.
Confirming that I was wrong about this in my communication with Oli. Also agreeing with Oli here on the context in which those comments were made.
I have made a note in my reflective journal entry on this event to be more careful with my comms in circumstances such as this one.
That’s rough! It sounds like you did the right thing (checking with an RP board member before saying NL was under RP) and then the harsh response was because others couldn’t tell you’d done the right thing.
My guess is if you had posted a second comment with the true information people would have downvoted the first incorrect one, upvoted the second, and the net would be negative (because people are very averse to false information being shared).
I feel like I shared very relevant information in either case, and IMO it feels like a reasonable mistake to make to think that Rethink Charity is the same as Rethink Priorities, given that they were indeed the same organization in the past.
I also messaged Niel from the Rethink board who himself said to me things that sounded like it confirmed that Nonlinear was fiscally sponsored (happy to share the text in DMs), so I feel like my epistemic state was really quite reasonable.