Money management without a bank account

Here are some options if you are finding it hard to apply for a bank account, or would like to manage your money in different ways.

Social Change Nest - a "Fiscal Sponsor"

A Fiscal Host, or Sponsor, is a legal entity that offers themselves up to hold funds for another group, manage the legal/financial side of things, and empower the group to get on with their work. In the UK, OpenCollective has the “Social Change Nest”, it’s a Community Interest Company that specialises in supporting groups organising for social change. This is a great option for XR local groups although please note that they charge £42 set up fee (paid after you’ve started collecting donations) and charge 5% on donations (not expenses) to cover their administration costs. They also offer trainings, support, access to specialised grants and more.

There is helpful a short XR presentation about them here. Read more about Social Change Nest on their website here.

Credit Unions and Community Banking may be a way of setting up a bank account for your local group. Find out more about this here.

If your group does not have a bank account then there are other ways of working.

Your regional/national organisation (usually called the 'Anchor Circle') bank account might be able to process your local group income and expenditure and keep a separate note of your balance. This method is used successfully by a few regions/nations already, but it does depend on have somebody on the regional team prepared to do the extra admin involved.

This idea could also work for if a local group that already has a bank account allows another local group to use the bank account as well. The same admin burden mentioned above could be an issue, but generally there are not many transactions for local groups, so this sharing is a practical solution if the goodwill and capacity is there to make it work.

Setting up a new bank account is time consuming. But an individual with online current account may find it very straightforward to add an online savings account; this could be used exclusively for XR funds. Or an individual may have a dormant bank account that could be used for their XR group.

The newer online/app based banks are another option. These can be more straighforward to set up a bank account for an individual and maybe for a climate community group.

This arrangement is not ideal, however, in that the responsibility rests with one person to look after the group’s funds.

Obviously, it is also a risk because if that person steps back from XR the group would need to ensure that the funds are passed back to XR. But many groups do work this way.