FOUNDATIONS/GRANTS

Charles Lowe is taking a break from his beat while he 
concentrates on Internet Prospector's new Web site.  In 
a weak moment, he agreed to let me step up to the 
foundation plate for a few months.

CALIFORNIA CHARITIES ONLINE

http://caag.state.ca.us/charities/disclaimer.htm

to learn all about the charities database and what you'll 
find in it.  The most recent (usually year ending 1998) 990s 
and 990PFs were scanned to create the database.  Note the 
sage search advice the AG gives: ". . . a "no match" 
response when searching for a financial report does not 
necessarily mean the charity in which you are interested 
does not exist . . . ."

You may search by nonprofit name, by city or by zip code. 
The results returned include contact information and a link 
to the .pdf (Acrobat Reader) form of the nonprofit's 990, 
if it's been added to the database.  Thank you to AG 
Bill Lockyer!

http://justice.hdcdojnet.state.ca.us/charity/charity.taf

FORUM OF REGIONAL ASSOCIATIONS OF GRANTMAKERS

An important resource for grantseekers in my region is the 
Pacific Northwest Grantmakers Forum (PNGF), a nonprofit 
helping grantmakers do a good job at being philanthropic. 

Of interest to researchers is the directory of grantmakers 
PNGF publishes and the informational help they offer.  Now 
PNGF-like organizations across the country -- actually the 
world -- have an electronic gathering place created by the 
Regional Associations of Grantmakers (RAG).  At the home 
page, choose individual RAGs from the menu bar on the left, 
then choose either the hot link for the list of those that 
are U.S.-based or for the international list.  At the end of 
either path, you'll find links to many of the individual 
association home pages.  And, from there, you'll find links 
to the home pages of their grantmaking friends.  I'm 
betting that those links -- the ones to the regional 
associations and the ones to the grantmakers -- will 
proliferate in the days to come.

When you follow the links to the internationals, you'll 
stumble onto a bonanza.  Associations serving grantmakers 
in the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, Finland, Germany 
and many other non-USA places abound. In fact, there are 
more international foundation links than we might ever have 
anticipated.  Get there directly by going to 

http://www.imag.org/memberorgs.htm.

Be sure to bookmark the RAG site.  There is more to explore 
here than the beeline to foundation Web sites that I've 
covered.  That local foundation not surfacing through 
other electronic channels may just surface on a RAG page 
first.

http://www.rag.org/
 

This Web site has a sub-title: ". . . for foundations with 
few or no staff."  Aren't we happy to discover the 
Association of Small Foundations' (ASF) gathering place? 
While there are no hotlinks to Web pages here, a nice, long 
list (that is updated often) of small foundations and their 
states of origin is nothing to snub. 

By using the "find" feature in your browser, you may just 
discover that the prospect you've been researching has a 
small foundation bearing her name.  And the Web page for 
that foundation may not be too far away: ASF offers Web 
page hosting to small foundations wishing to have an 
Internet presence.

http://www.smallfoundations.org/