The Williamsburg Community Foundation and the Peninsula Community Foundation announced this week that they have formed a new partnership with the Urban Institute’s Center for Charitable Statistics to provide detailed online information on local nonprofits.
Financial data pulled from nonprofit tax returns, nonprofit profiles and news, program information and location can be accessed through a new website, www.peninsulaconnects.org. The data can be filtered by demographic information and agency type. The nonprofit Urban Institute recently created this data-collection platform, and the local agencies are two of only a dozen or so community foundations in the country to try out the new system.
Peninsula Connect’s goal, according to the website, is to promote the services provided by nonprofit organizations and to help connect available resources with community needs.
“As community foundations, we often ask our grant recipients to collaborate on projects, this joint effort between two foundations better serves our communities by eliminating duplicative effort to map local service providers.” said Nancy Cote Sullivan, executive director of the Williamsburg Community Foundation.
“We look forward to continuing to explore the ways in which this resource can help our community and our local nonprofit organizations today and down the road.”
The new website will allow visitors to collect information about specific issues, such as homelessness, and to develop specific reports to further explore those concerns.
Though citizens can also use organizations such as Guidestar to look up financial data on nonprofits, Sullivan said that this new system will help get more specific data and will focus only on local nonprofits. “The Urban Institute is a nonprofit organization which, like Guidestar, collects nonprofit data for a wide variety of purposes; they have come up with this platform of providing the data through community foundations so that we can focus directly on the nonprofits in our service area,” she said.
The two local agencies are among the first 10 or 12 community foundations in the country to work with the Urban Institute, according to Sullivan.
“This is something that we have been trying to do for a long time and it is the first time we have been able to find a way to get this data just for our community without having to manually update it all the time,” Sullivan said. This new website replaces her organization’s Charitable Gifting Guide.
The site serves the Lower Peninsula, made up of the communities of Hampton, Newport News, Poquoson and the lower portion of York County, along with the Historic Triangle. There are over 1,000 registered nonprofits serving the Lower Peninsula and over 300 serving the Historic Triangle, according to Peninsula Connects.
Ferguson Enterprises provided the initial funding needed to launch Peninsula Connects.
