Facing the Future Together

The social sector is big. It's essential. It's complex. For a combined 85 years, Foundation Center and GuideStar have helped people make sense of that complexity.

But the world faces growing challenges: polarization, climate change, technological revolution, and poverty and inequality. Foundation Center and GuideStar must do more to support the social sector.

That's why we are combining our talent, technology, data, and leadership to become a new organization, Candid. There is so much more we can do together:

• We can offer a 360-degree view of the work of social good — who's doing what, where, on the issues that matter to people around the world.
• We can bring the nonprofit sector closer to having common profiles for every organization and in doing so promote more efficient systems for raising funds, managing grants and donations, and measuring impact
• We can offer insights that were never before possible and share those insights in clear and actionable ways.
• We can link the learning of changemakers around the world so they can work smarter, together.

Combining two historic organizations — with tools used by millions of people across hundreds of platforms — will be challenging, to say the least. Over the next several years, we will be weaving together technology systems, petabytes of data and content, dozens of products and services, and, most importantly, the deep knowledge and experience of more than 200 staff. But we are confident we can do it.

To guide this transition, we will aspire to the ideal embodied in our new name. The word candid speaks to the roots of Foundation Center and GuideStar, organizations born out of the need to provide fair, accurate, and objective information about foundations and nonprofits. It also informs how we will work, speaking to our future imperative of continuing to earn our stakeholders' trust in an information-wary world. To succeed, we will need to be honest about what works, what doesn't, what we know, and what we still need to figure out. In this vein, as Candid, we will use transparency as a guiding value in our communication with you.

Tomorrow two of our colleagues will discuss how we became Candid and what this change means for you. But now we turn to you. Tell us what you'd like to see in a stronger social sector: how can information transform the work of social good?

Bradford Smith is president and Jacob Harold is executive vice president of Candid.