Providing the essential services and practical support your work needs to thrive and grow.
Capacity
BUILDING
We provide this through a combination of in-house services and referrals to trusted partners. We do not earn referral fees or commissions from anyone listed here, and we have no arrangement that requires them to send work back to us. These are simply the people and firms we trust, have helped our community, and in many cases, we use ourselves.
Featured Services
Philanthropic & Impact Investment Advisory
Through the Ancient Futures Fund, we manage and advise philanthropic and impact investment capital across a global portfolio of catalytic charitable projects and impact ventures. Our investment philosophy — “The Praxis of Prosperity,” developed by Dr. Humaira Shahid and Shaykh Umar Vadillo — draws on the wisdom of great civilizations across history and cultures and applies it to the challenges of the modern world.
Donor Advised Fund -DAF Management
Through the Fund, we offer a Donor Advised Fund built on genuine partnership. You talk to real people who work to understand your aims and help you sharpen them. You gain a thought partner in the creative deployment of capital, including impact investments that grow your giving over time, and access to a community of advisors and implementers you can build alongside. Your giving can reach internationally, where its impact is often magnified.
We do not simply send your grant out the door and wish it luck. We are builders. Across Holistic Underground we run a global network of on-the-ground projects — more than 50 sponsored projects across four continents — so we can fiscally sponsor the specific project you want to see exist, advise you, build capacity, and stay in it with you through implementation rather than leaving you to hope it worked. This is a home for donors with bold visions, the ones whose ideas do not fit neatly into anyone else’s grant portal. You keep the tax benefit and the simplicity of a normal DAF. What you also gain is a partner, a philosophy, and a way to put your capital to work on the ground, anywhere in the world.
Non Profit & Business Tax Preparation
Your Form 990 is more than a filing — it is a public document that funders, watchdogs, and prospective partners read to judge whether you can be trusted with their money. Clean, well-prepared returns turn a compliance obligation into a credential. The firms we point you to are the ones we rely on for our own filings, so this is not a name pulled off a directory. For established organizations with real complexity, we recommend Fontanello, Duffield & Otake, LLP, the specialist nonprofit firm that prepares our taxes. For smaller and early-stage projects, we recommend Marjorie Jones and the team at Marj Tax, who supported us dutifully in our own early years. Either way, you walk away with a return that stands up to scrutiny and quietly works in your favor.
For personal and business taxes, we can share names of the folks we work with personally upon request.
Financial Advising
It helps to think about financial guidance in two horizons: the next one to ten years of your organization’s operations, and the decades of personal financial life that carry you to and through retirement. Both deserve attention, and they call for different specialists.
For the near horizon, many in our community work with JJo Advising, which helps nonprofits, mission-driven businesses, and social enterprises build durable systems — strategic planning, operational improvement, revenue strategy, and leadership development — so growth strengthens the organization instead of straining it. You come away making decisions from a position of clarity rather than reacting to the next fire.
For the long horizon, we have had good experiences with Boyea Financial, a certified financial planner who helps nonprofit leaders and founders align personal financial goals with a lifelong commitment to service — retirement planning, investments, and employer-sponsored plans such as 401(k), 403(b), and SIMPLE IRA. When your own financial future is secure, you lead the work with greater freedom.
Media Production
Sound legal counsel is the difference between a problem you handle in an afternoon and one that consumes a year. Contracts, employment questions, intellectual property, governance, and the mechanics of fiscal sponsorship all carry exposure that is far cheaper to prevent than to unwind. We recommend Mill Law Center, who have served as our own counsel and delivered consistently excellent work. Having a trusted firm on call means you can operate, hire, and sign with confidence, knowing the ground you stand on has been checked. The real value is not only solving problems when they arise, but structuring your work so that fewer of them ever do.
HR Services
The moment you hire your first employee, a new category of risk arrives: classification, wage-and-hour rules, handbooks, benefits, and the day-to-day of managing people well. Handled poorly, these become costly liabilities; handled well, they let you build a team that stays. We recommend and work with Castlerock HR Services, so this is a partner we know from the inside rather than a referral on paper. With the right HR support, you can grow your staff without becoming an employment-law expert yourself — your people are set up to do their best work, and you are protected while they do it.
Virtual Assistants
A founder’s time is the scarcest resource in any mission-driven organization, and too much of it disappears into work that someone else could do better. Reliable administrative support multiplies what you are able to accomplish and returns your hours to the work only you can do. We recommend Expand Your Capacity, founded by our partner Sonya Mehta, whose team understands the particular rhythms of mission-driven and nonprofit work rather than treating it like any other account. The result is not simply tasks off your plate — it is a version of your week where your attention finally goes to the things that actually advance your mission.
Fundraising
Fundraising capacity determines whether your mission stays small or reaches the scale your vision deserves. The organizations that thrive are the ones that build a repeatable engine — clear strategy, strong donor relationships, and campaigns that compound — rather than lurching from one appeal to the next. We recommend Darian Rodriguez Heyman at Helping People Help, a widely respected voice in nonprofit fundraising whose guidance helps leaders raise more while building the systems to sustain it. With the right approach, fundraising stops being the thing you dread and becomes a discipline you can rely on, funding the work you set out to do in the first place.
Branding
How you are perceived shapes everything downstream — the funders who take your call, the partners who say yes, the talent who wants to join you. Strong branding makes your story land the way you intend, so people grasp your value without you having to over-explain it. Because leaders and organizations have different branding needs, we point you to two specialists rather than one generalist. For top-level personal branding — the founder or leader whose name carries the work — we recommend Creative Muse Studios. For companies and products, we recommend The Branding Company. Getting the right fit means your brand does real work for you, opening doors before you even walk through them.
Other Services
It Takes a Village to Change the World.
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It Takes a Village to Change the World. ❈
❈ Frequently asked questions ❈
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Some of our providers are in-house vendors, and some are partners who we collaborate and refer to, but all of them are woven into this community of practice, and we love to collaborate. HU will serve as the coordinator, so you can interact with just one person, who can support you to get all the support you need.
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Each service has its own pricing. Some examples
Virtual assistants start at $20/hour
Branding and wev development services start at $1000
Media production ranges from $30-60 per hour
Coaching ranges from $150-450 per session, depending on the coach
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Through participatory design and community research, we sought to understand the needs our community of innovators, entrepreneurs and leaders have. What we discovered is that doing the amazing work they do requires a lot of different skills. Our modern culture expects us to do it all, unless we have millions to hire a whole company. And sometimes, the money isn't even the problem, its the trusted relationships and quality. So we have designed this model so that each of our clients and partners can get a specially designed package of just what they need.