CASSM Foundation was formed in October 2025, in the days after Hurricane Melissa was forecast to strike Jamaica, and evolved into CASSM Foundation Global as the work grew. The clinical delivery relationship that carried the response was established at the same time and under the same conditions. It worked in practice: the two organizations understood what each was doing, deployments ran, and nothing went wrong. On review with legal and accounting advisors, the arrangement was formalized on their recommendation. The advice was not that something had gone wrong. It was that the description of the relationship and the substance of it had never been tested against each other, and that testing them is not an exercise an organization can reliably perform on itself.
Informality is the predictable state, not the exceptional one
Guo and Acar (2005) examined why nonprofit organizations adopt formal collaborative arrangements rather than informal ones, and found that older organizations with larger budgets were more likely to formalize. Searing and Lecy (2022) describe the underlying condition as a liability of smallness. Small nonprofits typically run on volunteered time and founder capital, both scarce, lacking an operating record or external reputation, their allies and funders tend to be the founders' own contacts and what revenue exists goes to programs rather than to administration or capacity. Escaping that condition, they argue, requires stabilized finances, formalized managerial control, and predictable processes, and prior work locates a discernible transition point as revenues approach the US$100,000 mark and an organization begins allocating to paid administration rather than directing everything to programs.
The second element is the one that bears directly on how CASSM's relationships were formed. When partners arrive through the founders' own contacts, the relationship is carried by personal trust between people who already know each other. Trust of that kind is what makes a response possible at short notice, and it is also why nothing gets written down, the parties are not strangers requiring an instrument to define their dealings. The absence of documentation is not an oversight within that arrangement. It is a property of it.
An organization constituted in response to a disaster sits at the far end of that distribution. It has no operating history, no established procedures, and no interval between formation and first deployment in which to build any. The relationships that carry the response are formed in the same weeks as the organization itself, and they are formed because the work has to happen, not because a structure was designed and partners recruited into it. That is the correct order of priorities during a disaster. It is not a durable one afterward.
This reframes the problem rather than dissolving it. An organization that finds its principal delivery relationship resting on shared understanding has not made an unusual error, but it has arrived where its size, age, and circumstances predict. What distinguishes organizations is not whether they start there but how long they stay, and whether they find out from an advisor or from a dispute.
What an unexamined description accumulates into
The risk CASSM had not appreciated is that a description of a relationship does not stay in one place. A formulation written once, in a document produced under time pressure, gets reused. It appears in the next concept note because the last one used it. It appears on a webpage because it was already in the concept note. It reaches a funder, a government agency, a partner organization, and eventually it is on file with parties who have no reason to question it.
No individual instance involves a decision. That is the mechanism. A disaster response compresses the timeline of partnerships, submissions, acknowledgments, and public accounts are all generated within weeks, and the same phrase can be reproduced across all of them before anyone has had occasion to examine it.
Three things a description carries. How an organization characterizes its relationship with a delivery partner is not only a communications question. It bears on liability, since a partner described as operating under the organization's authority may be treated as doing so. It bears on accounting and tax treatment, since the difference between funding an independent provider and operating a division is a difference in what is being reported. And it bears on what each party can be held to, which is the question that only becomes urgent at the moment it is too late to negotiate.
None of these implications is visible from inside the working relationship, because inside the working relationship everyone knows what is meant. They become visible to a reader who was not there, which is precisely the reader a public description is written for.
The correction was larger than the decision
Formalizing the relationship was a discrete piece of work with a defined end. Bringing the published material into line with it was not. Every deployment account, methods note, and governance page that described clinical delivery had to be reviewed against the agreed terms, because a formal agreement that the organization's own website contradicts is worse than no agreement at all, it establishes that the organization knew the correct position and published a different one.
That review is the part worth anticipating. An organization considering when to seek advice should count not only the cost of the advice but the cost of the remediation, which scales with how much has been published in the interim. A disaster response produces a great deal in a short time, which means the remediation can be substantial even where the interval was not.
What this suggests for organizations at a similar stage
- Obtain advice on structure before the first public description, not after the tenth. The question to put to an advisor is not whether the arrangement is lawful but what the arrangement is, in terms the advisor's profession recognizes.
- Write the agreement first and derive the public description from it. Working the other way, describing the relationship publicly and formalizing later to match means the agreement inherits whatever the description happened to say.
- Treat the delivery partner's exposure as the partner's to agree, not yours to assume. An organization cannot unilaterally decide how much of its own risk a partner carries, and a description that implies otherwise commits someone who never consented to it.
- Recognize that trust and documentation are not substitutes. A relationship formed through personal contact is not made less trustworthy by being written down. It is made legible to people who were not party to it, including successors on both sides.
- When terms change, sweep the published record. Search for the superseded formulation rather than relying on memory of where it was used.
CASSM's current terms are set out on the Partners page, and the separation of oversight from delivery is described under Governance & Accountability.
What this account does not offer
This is not legal or accounting advice, and CASSM is not qualified to give any. The entire point of the account is that CASSM could not assess its own position and required professionals to do it. Structures that are sound in one jurisdiction are not necessarily sound in another, and the applicable considerations depend on facts specific to each organization.
CASSM is not presenting its present arrangement as a model. It reflects advice given on CASSM's particular facts. Another organization taking the same question to its own advisors may properly arrive somewhere else.
The lesson is about sequence, not about substance. What CASSM would do differently is not the structure it landed on but the point at which it asked.
References
Guo, C., & Acar, M. (2005). Understanding collaboration among nonprofit organizations: Combining resource dependency, institutional, and network perspectives. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 34(3), 340–361. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764005275411
Searing, E. A. M., & Lecy, J. D. (2022). Growing up nonprofit: Predictors of early-stage nonprofit formalization. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 51(3), 680–698. https://doi.org/10.1177/08997640211014280
Written by Dr. Donovan Miles, Doctor of Information Technology, Co-Founder and Chief Executive, CASSM Foundation Global.