Local Charitology

Use the local research workspace

Jump to the working workspace.

Set your boundary, population, question and search method below. Record needs with dates, denominators and public sources. Describe activities by mechanism and tentative depth, then track unanswered questions and whose input is missing. The summary counts only the activities you entered; it cannot describe the whole city.

Export a Markdown brief with methods, sources, limitations and a listening guide, or CSV for further mapping. JSON backs up the editable notebook. Nothing is submitted or published. Store only aggregate public information. A missing record is not evidence that no work exists. The wider city-mapping program below remains proposed.

What it is

Much giving stays close to home. Local Charitology would take local giving as it is and ask how to aim it well. It would apply the method to one city at a time: which problems the city has, which organizations work on them, where on the depth scale they act and where they overlap or leave gaps.

How it works

A city map would start from public data. ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer makes the tax filings of U.S. tax-exempt organizations searchable. Charity Impact Media publishes spending breakdowns from selected large U.S. public charities’ Form 990 filings. WHOFUNDS shows which private foundations fund which nonprofits, and publishes its own miss rate. Volunteers would code each organization by cause and depth, then check the map with the people who run those organizations and the people they serve.

The finished map would show where money and effort cluster, where several groups do the same thing and where its data do not identify work on a problem’s sources. Absence from the map would not prove that no work exists. It would also give local givers an honest comparison of what their money can do at home and what the same money could do elsewhere.

Why it matters for the system

The Proximity Pull is partly a moral question and partly an information gap. Local Charitology wouldn’t tell anyone to stop giving locally. It would close the information gap, both within the city and between the city and the rest of the world, so givers can choose with their eyes open.

The Fragmentation Problem is easiest to see at city scale, where dozens of organizations may work on the same problem without knowing exactly what the others do. A shared map would be a first coordination layer.

Risks and limits

Public data covers larger organizations best. Charity Impact Media, for example, includes only charities with $10 million or more in revenue, so smaller local groups have to be found another way, starting with the people who know the city. A map can also feel like a verdict, so it would describe what organizations do and never rate them.

What success looks like

Within five years, maps of at least five cities are public and local funders use them to coordinate. The method is documented well enough for any city to run its own.