Support Availability
A tax filing proves an organization exists. Nothing more.
Public nonprofit filings are genuinely useful and are used carefully here. What they cannot do is establish Support Availability, and treating them as though they can is how a resource list becomes confidently wrong.
What the filings are good for
Annual information returns filed by tax-exempt organizations are a real and valuable public record. They establish that an organization is registered, that it filed for a given year, roughly what size it is, and what it told the government its purpose was. For confirming that a name corresponds to a real registered entity rather than a defunct listing, they are excellent.
That is a meaningful check and we use it. An organization that has not filed in several years is worth a second look before we send anybody to it.
What they cannot establish
- Whether a programme still runs. The filing describes a fiscal year that ended well before the filing was published, which was itself well before you read it. A programme can have ended twice over in that gap.
- Whether they are taking people. Nothing in a tax return addresses intake, waitlists or capacity. These are the only questions availability is about.
- Whether the service is any good. Revenue is not quality. A well-funded organization can run a poor programme and a tiny one can run an excellent one.
- Whether they serve your county. Stated purpose is not service area.
- Whether the phone gets answered. Which, on a Tuesday afternoon with a parent who has not eaten properly in three days, is the entire question.
The timing problem alone would settle it
By the time a filing is public it is describing a period that ended a year or more earlier. Local service capacity moves in weeks. Using a document about last year to answer a question about this week is not a small inaccuracy, it is answering a different question and presenting the answer as though it were the right one.
Why this is worth stating plainly
Because filing data is machine readable, comprehensive and free, and everything else about availability is none of those. That makes it enormously tempting to build a resource site almost entirely out of it, and the result looks authoritative: complete national coverage, real registered entities, hard numbers.
It is also almost useless to the family, because every one of the questions they need answered is outside what the source can speak to. Comprehensiveness bought that way is comprehensiveness about the wrong thing.
What we do instead, and what it costs
Availability comes from what the organization currently says about itself, from public agency sources, and from people who called recently. All three are slower, patchier and harder to automate than a bulk data file. The result is narrower coverage that we can date and stand behind instead of national coverage we cannot.
Every row carries its source and its date, and a claim expires rather than persisting. The verification standard is written down so it can be checked rather than trusted.
The honest summary
Registration data tells you an organization is real. Support Availability tells you whether it can help you now. The first is a precondition for the second and is never a substitute for it, and a list that confuses them will send families to the doors of real, registered, well-run organizations that stopped taking new people in March.
Related: the four availability labels.