Welcome to the Community Foundation’s Equitable Nonprofit Finder. This free insight tool from BCT Partners helps those who want to find and support local nonprofits that are closest to neighborhoods that have the greatest needs and inequities.

The tool draws on data from 990 tax forms and the U.S. Census to help users:

  1. Find Rochester-area communities with the greatest needs, prioritizing disadvantaged communities of color;
  2. Identify the direct service providers that are most accessible to these communities; and
  3. Gain information and insight on the financial health of these organizations.

The Equitable Nonprofit Finder supports the Foundation’s mission to empower donors and community partners to strengthen our region through philanthropy.

To access the tool, click the button. We recommend that you first watch the one-minute video below for a preview of how it works.

Equitable Nonprofit Finder

More Information about the Tool

When you click to visit the Equitable Nonprofit Finder research tool, you will see two tabs at the top of the page: Community Finder and Organization Finder.

The Community Finder tab takes you to a map that will help you explore and find local communities that you might be interested in supporting. The map presents the nine-county Rochester region, broken out by Census Tract, which is how the Census Bureau defines a “community.”

Next to the map are three filters you can use to find communities of interest. You can select communities by:

  1. The County or Counties you are interested in exploring;
  2. The level of Community Well-Being that you would like to be your focus; and/or
  3. The diversity of the community. Once you have made your selections, the map will highlight the communities that meet your criteria.

Then, you can learn about the nonprofit service needs for the communities that you’ve selected by pointing and holding your mouse cursor over any location on the map. Specifically, you can discover more about the location and population of that community, the well-being of its residents, and whether residents have enough access to the types of nonprofits that could help them most with improving their lives.

Once you have completed your search using the Community Finder, you are now ready to view the organizations that serve the communities you just selected. The Organization Finder link will take you to a page where you can see a list of nonprofit providers for the communities you’ve chosen to review. This list provides the organization name, location, and type of services provided.

Additionally, the list presents how many persons in need can access each organization’s services, including how many of these residents are persons of color. Lastly, the list presents financial information on each organization, including each provider’s current and forecasted financial health, using a top field-accepted indicator of months of reserves.

The Organization Finder can be used to search for specific organizations by name, as well as sort organizations by different criteria. You can go back and forth between the Community Finder and Organization Finder, and the Equitable Nonprofit Finder will adjust accordingly.