This kind of fiscal sponsorship goes by several names depending on who you ask: Model C, a pre-approved grant relationship, grantor-grantee relationship, and so on. The label may change by sponsor and by region, but the structure underneath is the same: a fiscal sponsor regrants funds to a separate legal entity it has already vetted and approved, for a specific and restricted purpose defined in the grant agreement.
We'll use "Model C" throughout this post for simplicity, but everything here holds regardless of what your organization calls it.
A Model C fiscal sponsorship agreement is a grantor-grantee relationship, not a pass-through. Approving a project means the sponsor is exercising real discretion: vetting the grantee, confirming it's an identifiable legal entity, and satisfying itself that funds will go where the agreement says they will and for the purpose they are intended for.
That due diligence only holds up if every grant disbursement that follows keeps honoring it. That's the gap Mazlo's newest capability closes.
The moment that matters
Here's the workflow, stripped down to what actually happens day to day:
A project needs funds. Someone on the project opens Mazlo and submits a spend request. And they can only submit it for one contact: the recipient their fiscal sponsor designated when the account was set up.
Not a contact they choose that day. Not whoever happens to be listed as a signer. The one contact designated by the sponsor for this specific grant.
If someone tries to submit a request against that account, the recipient field is already filled in, and it's locked:
"Your account type sends every spend request to one recipient, so this cannot be changed without approval from your sponsor."
There's no dropdown to second-guess and no field to overwrite. The request goes forward with exactly one possible destination.
Why this is about certainty, not just control
It's worth being precise about what this feature does and doesn't do. Under Model C, funds are restricted as to purpose: the sponsor retains variance power and could, in principle, redirect them to another entity serving the same purpose. This feature isn't a tax-law mechanism, and it doesn't change that underlying structure.
What it addresses is a much more everyday risk: the operational gap between who the sponsor agreed to fund and who actually gets paid. That gap is where things can go wrong: a spend request submitted for a different individual, a bank account changed without anyone noticing, someone gaining access to a project's account and quietly editing where the money lands.
By locking every spend request to the designated contact, Mazlo makes sure the day-to-day mechanics of paying out a grant can never drift from the decision the sponsor already made, unless the sponsor chooses a new designated contact. The certainty of due diligence holds every time after that.
What the sponsor sees
The same certainty carries through to review. Before anything is approved or paid, every pending spend request shows the recipient plainly, next to the account it came from and the amount requested:
There's nothing to cross-reference against the agreement and no separate check to run: the recipient the sponsor is looking at is, by construction, the only recipient that request could have named.
Built for how Model C actually works
Fiscal sponsors managing a large portfolio of Model C projects don't have time to re-verify a recipient on every request that comes in. This feature turns that recurring check into a systematized verification: name the approved contact once, and every request that follows from that project, submitted by anyone with access, is automatically bound to it.
That's the model Mazlo is building toward: not more paperwork, but fewer moments where certainty depends on someone remembering to look closely.
Have questions about how this fits your organization's Model C agreements? Reach out to our team.