A couple of years ago, together with Paula Grünwald and Kristina Klein, I co-founded a fiscal host called interalia. For those who know my vague career path, co-founding a fiscal host might seem a bit left-field, but actually, there’s a lot about it that made sense to me.

What’s a fiscal host, you ask? It’s where a legally registered organisation – the host – holds and manages money on behalf of someone else, and takes responsibility for what happens with those funds.

One reason I got involved in this space is the deep inequalities and inherent “stupid rules”, as David Graeber put it, within operational and financial systems. So much of this is somewhat hidden behind the most obvious ‘stupid rules’ of immigration and borders. I saw this first-hand while working at The Engine Room, a fully remote organisation where, at its peak while I was there, we had people in 13 different countries. From payments getting flagged and delayed under anti-money laundering legislation when they were going to team members or contractors in certain countries, and much more.

The rules that lead to certain countries being flagged and others not, is a consequence of the stupid rules and inherent violence of borders. People being treated differently, depending on where they were born. But it’s easy to hide that violence behind reams of bureaucracy.

For non-profit organisations, or groups of people wanting to receive money from philanthropic foundations, the rules can be even more specific. And yet, as I found out as I began to delve into this world of non-profit finance while working in Executive Leadership – if you know the right ways to do it, those rules can be slightly bent, or interpreted in different ways. But to do that, you need both a lot of substantive expertise, and a certain level of privilege to know that if it does go a little bit wrong, you’re not, for example, putting your visa or immigration status at risk.

This layer of financial and operational infrastructure for non-profits is one that has taken some heavy hits from conservative forces. Dr. Suparna Chaudhry calls these “administrative crackdowns”, which is a term I’ve used hundreds of times since first reading it in her work. It’s a term that describes the ways in which states try to weaken non-profits using bureaucracy, laws and governance. When I think of state attacks on non-profits, I think of things like putting activists in jail, raids on offices to scare people or steal equipment, or simply shutting down or banning certain groups. All of those methods are very visible, easy to identify the ‘villain’ and in most cases, easy to craft a campaign around – and administrative crackdowns provide an alternative.

What Chaudhry describes is the way in which states use laws to “to discourage, burden, or prevent the formation of NGOs”; or to “impose restrictions on how NGOs secure financial resources".” I never realised before getting involved more on the back-end side of non-profits and joining NGO boards, how much time goes into making sure that appropriate (and often changing) legislation is being followed, that taxes are both filed on time and the appropriate documentation is maintained over the year, and much more.

Getting people tied up in those administrative loopholes is a hugely effective way of taking away attention and energy from their actual mission.

Even in the best of cases, keeping on top of all that bureaucracy is a full time job. Perhaps more crucially: it’s a job that actually has relatively little to do with the whole reason of setting up a mission-driven NGO – that is, organising, activism, speaking truth to power, changing social structures or fighting for better conditions.

So, back to why I found the idea of co-founding a fiscal host so compelling a couple of years ago: because, if done well, a fiscal host provides an alternative to people having to deal with all this, and as a consequence, leaves people with energy, ideas and connections more time to do what they do best.

The goal of a fiscal host – or at least, the goal of interalia when we set it up: to take care of the operational and financial needs of groups so that they can concentrate more on what they do best. You can read more about interalia specifically in this strategy document – I’m quite proud of it for, hopefully, laying out both the problems and reasons interalia exists, and also the quite concrete ways in which the organisation is working to address them, in an accessible way.

Fiscal hosts have the potential to provide a layer of financial infrastructure that is both protective of civil society, and enabling. For example: people who might want to receive funding in a country but who don’t have the necessary language skills to navigate setting up a non-profit. People who are worried about receiving funds from a certain foreign group, who need a bit of cover to be able to do their work. There are so many reasons a fiscal host might be needed, and yet, relatively few active in Germany or even across Europe.

I moved off the core team of interalia in mid-2025, once the foundations were pretty set and the work was less about setting strategy and partnerships, and much more focused on the actual operations and finance expertise (which is not my jam!), and I remain on the Advisory Council. And I’m so happy to hear of more and more people who’ve found their services really helpful in the meantime!

Links from around the web

• As part of the work I did for interalia before leaving the core team, I wrote this report on fiscal hosting within the internet freedom space – it’s a summary of learnings from a lot of conversations I had with people in the space about what would be helpful and not helpful from a fiscal host.

• Related to some of the topics I talk about above, Gauri von Gulik recently founded Dear Money, a ‘a shame-free space rooted in radical care, kindness, and inclusivity’ to talk about your relationship with money.

• It was Wikipedia’s 25th birthday this week – happy birthday, Wikipedia! Speaking of infrastructure, Wikipedia remains one of the most successful knowledge infrastructure projects I can think of. Indeed: it’s so important that shady PR companies are paid to rewrite it for billionaires, as a new investigation from TBIJ revealed this week. Fun fact: an article written in 2015 about the gender bias in Wikipedia, quoted me with what I think remains my favourite media citation ever: “a Wikipedia editing war is not my style”. Clearly I learn nothing, though, because I’ve been trapped in an edit war about the profile page of the wonderful Kübra Gümüşay, for months now… experienced editors, send help!

• This newsletter issue, The Thing about German Schools, by Naomi Ryland, feels like it was written for me. So maybe it’s also helpful to you!

• There’s a lot going on in the world right now. Whenever there are major developments in places in the world I don’t know too much about, I always turn to Global Voices for accurate, local perspectives – so if you’re also wanting to know more about what’s going on in Venezuela, I can really recommend their coverage.