Partnering to preserve nonprofit knowledge

Easy, open access to trustworthy information has never been more important. Misinformation is rampant, with data and facts increasingly manipulated to fit specific agendas. Candid and the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) embrace our job to collect, preserve, and share the information our sector needs to make decisions that create real impact and support philanthropy’s collective capacity to serve.

With that shared purpose in mind, we’re delighted to announce a partnership that will permanently house Issue Lab’s archive—a collection of research, analysis, and insights from nonprofit and philanthropic organizations around the world—within the RAC. Over the next year, we’ll work together to migrate and house all Issue Lab’s current resources in the RAC’s permanent collection, ensuring it stays accessible for all.

This is the first step in what we anticipate will be an ongoing partnership, demonstrating our shared commitment to transparency, access, and accountability.

Commitment to transparency

Transparency has long been a cornerstone of both our missions. It’s key to meeting society’s most urgent needs and finding solutions to our toughest problems—because to know where we’re going, we need to know where we’ve been.

For 20 years, Issue Lab has collected the knowledge and insights produced through the work of social sector organizations, with Candid (formerly Foundation Center) stewarding that research and data along the way. The RAC is one of the world’s leading archives for philanthropic and nonprofit history, and this partnership means Issue Lab’s collection will be preserved, cared for, and made accessible to researchers, practitioners, and funders for generations to come.

We believe that people should be able to quickly and easily find the information they need to make informed decisions. Together, our organizations bring more than 70 years of experience documenting and preserving the sector’s history and knowledge, from personal papers to deep dives into today’s most pressing issues. That experience perfectly positions us to offer a clear, honest look at what’s worked, what hasn’t, and where we go from here.

Candid’s collection of more than 36,000 research reports, case studies, and toolkits spans topics like democracy, evaluation, and climate change. It will join the RAC’s vast collection of materials from organizations dedicated to the public good, covering fields from medicine, science, and public health to the arts, agriculture, social sciences, urban affairs, and public policy.

Aligned with Issue Lab’s mission to provide an open-access repository for nonprofit knowledge, the RAC only accepts material that will at some point be made available to the public,  a commitment that will help anyone looking for clearer paths to the creation of knowledge. That kind of openness only matters if people can actually find what they’re looking for.

Broadening access to knowledge

Over the past two decades, Issue Lab has built a small but dedicated community, but its reach is limited. While not intentional, that limitation can create a barrier to access.

The RAC holds the largest collection of philanthropic records in the world, including from Candid’s predecessor organization, Foundation Center. It’s the go-to source for people who care about accuracy and depth. Together, these materials broaden access to information, so anyone, anywhere, can understand our sector’s successes and failures in the pursuit of better solutions. The RAC believes in building and sharing the evidence needed to understand philanthropy over time to strengthen transparency, accountability, and informed decision making. 

If philanthropy is to serve the public good, it must be open to reflection, challenge, and critical inquiry. To create a dedicated home for that work, the RAC has established the Center for Collective Inquiry on Philanthropy (CCIP). CCIP brings philanthropic practice and scholarship into sustained exchange, enriched by perspectives from journalism, policy, culture, and other fields that can challenge and clarify how philanthropy is understood, organized, and exercised over time. It surfaces questions from the field, sharpens them for broader engagement, and generates the frames, syntheses, and insights that help philanthropy examine its assumptions and act with greater strategic clarity. Issue Lab is a natural partner to this mission.

Wider access does more than help people find information; it invites more scrutiny, too, which is exactly the point.

Demonstrating shared accountability

Philanthropy doesn’t face the same oversight as government or corporations, with no regulatory agency set up to oversee the enterprise’s work. But that doesn’t make accountability any less important. If anything, the stakes are higher.

That’s where Candid and the RAC come in. We’re both independent organizations, accountable to the public for our tax-exempt status. Housing the Issue Lab collections at the RAC means a team of professional archivists who are leaders in the field, using state-of-the-art technology, will care for them, putting this information on a bigger platform with a trusted reputation and wide audience.

People should ask tough questions about the work of philanthropy. Where do we see success, and where are there failures from which society can learn? What opportunities exist to test experimental solutions on a larger scale? As the sector’s information providers, our collaboration makes finding answers to these kinds of questions, and so many more, increasingly possible.

Issue Lab is just the beginning of our combined efforts to grow our collective knowledge. We see great potential in our two organizations, both steeped in sector history, partnering this way and look forward to the future. 

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