Most Important CLN Policies, Protocols & Guidelines:
 
 
 (OLD see PDF for final version)
 
Introduction:
 
Besides the legal requirement to following the CLN top legal requirements, there are also a variety of policies, protocols, and guidelines that are internal to the CLN umbrella non-profit.  Some of these policies are mandatory that you must follow or risk initiating a long-term spin-off process to end fiscal sponsorship.  There is always more than one way to accomplish a CLN policy, it just might take doing the task twice, once for the way you want to do it, and again to report it to CLN the way that we format our systems.  Other policies are just guidelines and are optional to follow but help us all work together and make your project more successful.
 
Why Have Internal Policies?
 
The main reason we have all these internal policies, protocols, and guidelines is not to control or influence projects, but instead to help us meet our legal requirements, keep the non-profit tax exempt, build continuity, and most important build a framework for an interconnected community.  Because we are an umbrella non-profit, a lot of the sponsored projects simply are not related, and you may not even know about them.  For some projects, the only thing that binds us all together is our processes, systems, protocols, and the general way we run our organizations.  So our goal as a broad network is to have a set of processes, protocols, and guidelines that everyone follows so that we can easily synchronize, integrate, and cross organize between all the projects and programs within our umbrella networks.   
 
Types of Policies:
 
The main types of policies we  want to unify and integrate are the main functional systems for running programs and organizing within the network.  If you are not interested in learning our systems and integrate with our umbrella, that is exactly the type of reason for not being a good fit and maybe you should consider finding an other fiscal sponsor. All sponsored projects can spin-off at anytime and the CLN also can initiate a spin-off at anytime. But we feel that over time as you learn our systems and processes, that you will like them and realize the incredible benefits that we can all achieve by working collaboratively together instead of as separate unconnected groups.  
 
Examples of Policies:
 
What would happen if each fiscally sponsored project all had a different system for dealing with finances, including budgeting, tracking expenditures and income, and documenting workers and pay.  It would create chaos because it would be impossible for us to integrate all the finances together to pay our taxes correctly, and report our umbrella non-profit activities to the government, and eventually we would loose our tax-exempt status.  Additionally if we all have different procedures on documentation of meetings and decisions, or HR reporting, or internal structures and inconsistant vocabulary describing our systems, it makes it very difficult for us to keep everything synchronized and coordinated to support each individual project the level we want to.  No single project is ever going to implement every policy of the network, but our goal is that if someone chooses to help out an other fiscally sponsored project within our network, that they would see at least some of the same processes and procedures and have a sense of being from the same community because they can easily integrate themselves into a new project that otherwise could have nothing in common.
 
Vocabulary:
 
Policies - all the protocols, guidelines, systems, processes, and other regulations.
Protocols - Mandatory systems, processes and regulations.
Guidelines - Optional but highly encouraged processes and systems.
 
 
List of Most Important Policies

Brielf Descriptions of Most Important CLN Policies

Guidelines (Optional)