Philanthropy

Celebrate American Philanthropy on Giving Tuesday


America’s charitable spirit is one-of-a-kind. Since colonial days, Americans have turned to charity—not government programs—to feed the hungry, nurse the sick, and lift up the poor, making our people the most generous in history, bar none.

For the past decade, givers have celebrated that good, old-fashioned tradition every year on Giving Tuesday by donating billions of dollars to worthy causes around the world. The Capital Research Center is here to help. Since 1984, we’ve provided groundbreaking and independent research into nonprofits across the political spectrum to help you make thoughtful decisions about your philanthropy.

Research Tools

InfluenceWatch should be the first stop for any giver. InfluenceWatch catalogues information on over 10,000 public policy influencers, nonprofits, labor unions, lobbying groups, and political action committees.

We developed this powerful tool to inform everyone from journalists to donors about the nonprofits that influence America’s politics—and the donors bankrolling them. With our system, you can track who funds whom, view the nonprofit’s most recently available IRS financial statements, and see how key political players connect with other groups. We’ve also integrated key information from Open the Books, allowing even deeper insights into who’s pulling strings in Washington, DC.

ProPublica is a leading database on nonprofit financial information, most notably groups’ IRS Form 990 disclosures. A glance can reveal a nonprofit’s board of directors, leadership, mission statement, tax exempt status, and financial state, including its assets and annual budgets.

OpenSecrets is a top nonpartisan watchdog for everything in the nonprofit sector. If you’re looking for more on the top political spenders in the 2022 election cycle and “dark money” on both the left and the right, look no further.

Diving into the Deep End

Here’s a peek at some of our newest profiles at InfluenceWatch:

The National Vote at Home Institute is the Left’s top vote-by-mail advocate, responsible for transforming 2020 into the country’s first mail-in election—with disastrous results for election security. We’ve traced funding from the postal workers’ union, critical lawsuits in battleground states, and ties to the shadowy Democracy Alliance. You won’t want to miss this profile.

If you haven’t heard of Pierre Omidyar, buckle up—he’s the next George Soros. The founder of eBay is rapidly becoming one of the Left’s top mega-donors through a collection of nonprofits and for-profit companies known as the Omidyar Nexus. To date, we’ve traced Omidyar cash to groups ranging from voter registration efforts to Bill Kristol’s NeverTrump group Defending Democracy Together.

Call Marie Stopes International the Planned Parenthood of Great Britain; it’s certainly earned the title. Since 1976, this anti-life advocate—named for Britain’s greatest eugenicist and anti-Semite—has pushed abortion in dozens of countries across Asia and Africa. We’ve recorded the group boasting about performing illegal abortions in multiple countries and traced enormous grants from investment billionaire Warren Buffett and other U.S. foundations.

These are just a few examples in a growing trove of nonprofit information you can use to make sure your money goes to causes you support, not the ones with the best-sounding names.

Happy Giving Tuesday!

Hayden Ludwig

Hayden Ludwig is the Director of Policy Research at Restoration of America. He was formerly Senior Investigative Researcher at Capital Research Center. Ludwig is a native of Orange County, California,…
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