SPARC to Become a Non-profit

At long last arriving where it should have been all along, SPARC announced Friday that it has become a 501(c)3 organization, effective June 1, 2025, pending IRS approval. Thus ends a long saga (2014-25) of SPARC as a project of the New Venture Fund (part of Arabella Advisors) via a fiscal sponsorship agreement. What will also end are misleading statements about its nonprofit status.

Figuring all this out required a lot of untangling, and Richard Poynder played a key role. The potential of a problem first hit my radar in 2018, when I was going through what I thought were the motions of looking up SPARC’s 990, the annual report non-profits file with the IRS. Not finding one, I started digging.

You can find a lot more about the saga and other threads about SPARC’s lobbying, deceits, and conflicts by searching this site for “SPARC.”

There is no guarantee SPARC will change in a good way with this — after all, being a non-profit is no guarantee you are doing good — and in 2025, SPARC has seemed to tilt MAGA, censoring its own equity language before the Trump inauguration, and then using a lobbyist with tight MAGA ties more recently. Also, SPARC played a key role in the development of the Nelson Memo, which had its implementation recently accelerated as part of the Administration’s ongoing hassling of publishers.

What will happen next? Organizationally, there will be a process as SPARC revises various documents, awaits the IRS decision, escrows grants with an outside 501(c)3, and so forth. It will be a few years before we see their first 990.

Until then, this removes some stigma and uncertainty about SPARC in the community, and confirms what we knew all along — SPARC was not a non-profit, despite what it repeatedly claimed. It also means SPARC won’t be able to lobby in the same way, but it may become more effective in other ways as a standalone non-profit. Given its history, it will still need some attention.

Whatever comes next, I’m glad this change is happening. It’s overdue.