PARTNERS

Partners & independence

There are no partners and no funders to disclose. The more useful thing to publish before there are any is the rule about who can never be one.

A logo wall proves nothing about independence, and the organisations that lose theirs rarely do it by taking an obviously compromising cheque. It happens gradually, from money accepted before anyone had written down which money would be refused. So the rule goes up first, while refusing costs nothing.

The Independence Policy

This is the operative text, reproduced from Financials & Transparency. It takes effect on TASFGA’s date of formation, and applies to partnership and board seats as well as to money.

  1. Excluded sources. TASFGA will accept no funding from any entity whose conduct it reviews in an active area of focus. For the founding focus — residential community governance — that excludes managing-agent firms, the law firms that represent them, and real-estate brokerages operating in the condominium and cooperative market. The exclusion list expands each time a new area of focus is activated, and it is published when it does.
  2. Donor disclosure. Every donor contributing $5,000 or more in a year is named publicly. No anonymous gift above that threshold is accepted at all — an undisclosed major funder and a disclosed one are not the same problem, and only one of them can be checked.
  3. Firewall. No funder, at any amount, reviews, approves, or sees research before publication. No research conclusion is ever conditioned on funding, and no funder is given advance notice of a finding concerning anyone.
  4. Same rule for seats and partnerships. An excluded entity cannot buy influence with a board seat, an advisory role, a co-publication, or in-kind support any more than with a cheque.

What partnership would involve

Partnership means shared work, not a logo exchange. The four kinds that would be useful:

  • Academic — housing-law clinics, urban-policy programmes, and schools of public administration contributing research and student practitioners. The most valuable version is a clinic that will test a review practice against real records and tell us where it fails.
  • Civil society — owner-advocacy coalitions and tenants’ rights organisations where co-op and condo governance meets broader housing work.
  • Media — newsrooms covering housing, finance, and regulatory gaps. Co-publication on a documented finding is more useful than a citation.
  • Foundation — funders underwriting research and standards development, on the firewall terms above.

What it would not involve

No endorsement in either direction. A partner is not vouched for by TASFGA and does not vouch for TASFGA’s findings. Nobody gets to cite a partnership as a governance credential.

No review before publication. A partner on a piece of joint work sees it as a collaborator; a partner on unrelated research sees it when everyone else does.

No exclusivity. Data, standards, and review practices are published openly. A partnership that required them to be withheld from anyone else would defeat the purpose of publishing them.

Current status

No partnership agreements exist and none has been executed. TASFGA is pre-incorporation, has taken no money from anyone, and has nothing to disclose — which is why this page is a policy rather than a list. Named partners will appear here when there are any, and funders will be disclosed on the schedule set out in the policy above.

Partnership enquiries: contact@tasfga.com. If you think the Independence Policy has a hole in it, that is more useful still — the time to find one is before there is money on the table.