Commoning as Infrastructure: Fiscal Sponsorship and the Solidarity Economy
As a social sector member of the Design Economics Coalition, Thaddeus Squire brings more than 25 years of nonprofit innovation focused on shared infrastructure and collective action. As Lead Advocacy & Learning Steward at Social Impact Commons, the first national field-building organization for fiscal sponsorship, Squire applies a commoning lens to nonprofit resource sharing, framing fiscal sponsorship as a structure for building economic resilience from the ground up.
What alternative measures beyond GDP or monetary value do you use to evaluate community well-being?
I favor frameworks that are more holistic and wellbeing-oriented such as vital indicators of health systems (e.g., https://rippel.org/vital-conditions/). These go beyond mere economic indicators of well-being.
In what ways have you seen social capital and connections create economic value that traditional metrics miss?
Coming from the arts, I’ve seen the negative impacts of exogenous-based metrics and impacts on a field whose benefits stem from experiential, relational, and other endogenous dynamics. Traditional quantitative methods of impact measurement really don’t apply to the arts.
How has recognizing social capital changed your program design or implementation?
I think it’s always been an intrinsic element of our program design, given that our field of work in fiscal sponsorship is more of a socially defined and constructed field than one defined either by legal or regulatory distinction/definition.
How do you help communities recognize and leverage their social capital for economic resilience?
My work concerns the field of fiscal sponsorship as shared nonprofit infrastructure. We apply a commoning lens to the field and frame it as offering structures for commoning and collective action. We believe that shared infrastructure is enabled by social capital exchange and is a predicate for leveraging other economic benefits, such as sustainability, anti-fragility, and others.
About This Interview
Design Economics Coalition members complete a self-interview exploring how their work connects to the three tenets of design economics: acknowledging change, embracing creativity, and cultivating literacy. These responses help connect professionals across sectors who are working to evolve economic systems.
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