Stewardship & Operations

1. Purpose

The Strategic Plan describes why the Project exists and how the initiative works. This document describes how the organization behind it operates: who holds what, under which terms, with what money, and inside which legal boundaries. Founding families should read the plan; this document exists so that anyone who asks a hard question about structure gets a complete, written answer. Nothing here is legal advice; before public launch, counsel familiar with content licensing and youth-serving organizations should convert these positions into final instruments.

2. The Bright Line

One principle governs every operational decision: liability and duty follow control, not content. The organization therefore publishes a framework and deliberately exercises no control over local activity.

The organization does: publish educational content (covenant, glossary, playbooks, formation series, meeting kits, oversight guide); operate the Project website that delivers it; steward and license the framework and name.

The organization does not — anywhere, ever: operate, host, sponsor, or supervise any local gathering; select, screen, approve, certify, or endorse any volunteer, Lead, Host, or facilitator; take custody of children; collect fees for local events; or direct any community’s activities. A group of parents adopting the framework is called a community (explicitly, a Savio Community) — the word is chosen deliberately over “chapter,” because a chapter implies a charter granted from above, and no such grant exists. Communities are independent, self-organizing associations of parents, constituted by nothing more than their members’ covenant — not agents, franchisees, affiliates, or representatives — and the terms of use require them to identify themselves as such. A homeroom social a thousand miles away is legally identical to a neighborhood barbecue: organized by the parents who threw it, on their own responsibility.

A deliberate consequence: the organization must resist the well-meaning urge to vet or accredit local leaders. Certifying a Host would make the organization responsible for the certification. The published safety guidance (Section 8) exists so local communities can protect themselves; following it is each community’s job.

3. Entity Structure and Roadmap

Now. An initial steward entity will be formalized, holding all Project intellectual property — content, names, and the Project website — under the published Stewardship Commitment. Funding at this stage is sponsorship (a commercial arrangement any entity can honestly offer) — the word “donation” is not used, because donations to a for-profit are not tax-deductible and charitable solicitation is state-regulated. The word “Foundation” is likewise reserved until it is true.

As the Project matures. Stewardship may transfer to another entity — nonprofit or not — at any time, with the Stewardship Commitment binding every successor. At sufficient scale, a not-for-profit foundation is the likely destination: at that point “Foundation,” tax-deductible donations, and a board become accurate, and the mission assets — core content, name, and the free platform — are assigned to it. Commercial products remain with their owners (Section 6).

At the pilot school. The founders are also local parents. When they host gatherings, they do so as private individuals hosting private social events — not as the organization. Keeping that distinction in practice, not just on paper, is what preserves the bright line of Section 2.

4. Intellectual Property and Licensing

Dual licensing. The steward holds copyright in all core content and releases it to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license: free for any family, community, school, or ministry to use, share, and adapt for the mission; no commercial use by anyone. Because the non-commercial restriction binds everyone except the copyright holder, the steward may separately grant commercial licenses — on published terms. Free as in beer; the brewery is stewarded.

The irreversibility rule. License terms for existing users are never tightened retroactively. This is the lesson of the Redis relicensing conflict: communities do not punish monetization, they punish changed deals, and content forks are the community’s recourse. Terms may loosen over time; they may never retroactively tighten.

Contributions. Anyone authoring content for the Project agrees to a short contributor agreement (CLA) granting the steward the rights needed to maintain dual licensing, with permanent public credit. Without it, contributed material freezes the Project’s ability to license, transfer to the nonprofit, or publish. Ideas, feedback, testing, and event-hosting create no IP entanglement and need no paperwork.

Registrations. Copyright arises automatically, but register core works with the U.S. Copyright Office (about $65) once they circulate beyond the founding team, to unlock statutory damages. File trademark applications for the final names (movement, children’s program) when chosen — for a would-be national movement, the marks are where lasting protection lives.

5. Terms of Use and Indemnification

Access to all content, the app, and the name is conditioned on terms of use providing: content is educational, provided as-is, with no warranty and no professional advice of any kind; users are solely responsible for their own activities, events, and compliance with local law; users indemnify and hold harmless the steward, its owners, and contributors against any claim arising from their use of the materials or their local activities; communities must self-identify as independent parent groups; and the license to use the Project name is revocable for misuse. The content library provides optional templates for communities (participation sheets, facilitation ground-rule agreements, media releases) — the organization provides the paper, never the process.

6. Platforms, Products, and Money

Project assets: the content and the website. The Project itself owns exactly two digital things: the core content and the website that delivers it, free, forever — the first promise of the Stewardship Commitment. The website is content-only: no messaging, no forums, no comments, no user-generated content, for adults or children. This is principle (the Project will not build for parents the medium it trains children to resist) and protection (no UGC means no defamation surface, no moderation duty, no discoverable archive about other people’s children). No incident records, no named children, no case files, ever.

Products and services: not Project assets. Products and services that build on the framework under commercial license — whoever builds them — are owned by their builders, who bear their costs, liability, and upside. Two conditions attach to every commercial license: any product touching children’s accounts must be parent-managed, data-minimal, and COPPA-compliant; and no product carrying the framework may include messaging or user-generated content. The mission entity never owns products; products never gate the mission.

Sustainability, stated plainly. The mission is free for families, forever; the infrastructure is not free to run. The work is sustained by sponsorships, institutional licenses, and optional commercial products — never by charging families to participate. This work is offered in generosity, in answer to the call to “go out to all the world and proclaim the gospel to all creation” (Mk 16:15); because sustaining its core contributors sustains the Project, they may be supported from these sources — openly, modestly, and never at families’ expense.

7. Recommended Tools Policy

The Project recommends tools by published criteria, not by favor. The criteria implement the covenant norms — e.g., parental review of messaging, bedroom-free defaults, age-appropriate staging, filtering, no dark patterns, data minimalism. Any tool meeting the criteria is listed; any product built by the steward’s owners is labeled as such, always. Early on the list may contain one entry; the criteria, not the entry, are the policy. This converts a promotional channel into a standards body — fair to competitors, durable under scrutiny, and honest to families.

8. Published Safety Guidance

Every meeting kit repeats a safety one-pager addressed to communities, as guidance for their own protection: children’s activities follow safe-environment norms (background-checked volunteers where the diocese provides clearance — most parent volunteers already hold it — a two-adult rule, no adult alone with a child not their own, parents present or nearby for young tiers); hosts of home events confirm homeowner’s coverage; and anything touching abuse, threats, or crime goes immediately to the school, diocese, and authorities. Publishing strong guidance protects children and the movement’s reputation without transferring the communities’ responsibility to the organization — as a curriculum publisher recommends classroom practices it does not enforce.

9. Insurance

Steward phase: general liability for the steward’s Project activities, adding media-liability coverage as content distribution grows — inexpensive for a publisher-profile operation. Nonprofit phase: directors-and-officers coverage for the board at formation.