[exceptione]

I do not mean to sponsor an external entity.

You have to analyze a project, and that might mean you need to fork it. It all depends on how much you need to steer and help. If a community is happy to welcome some formal stewardship, then that might work too. There is a company that contributes a lot to Libre Office. The same with Blender, where there can be cooperative development.

A hard fork is always possible, and nothing bad if the vision and needs differ from teams. Some might fork the EU stuff in turn. The free software model is designed to support that.