Preserving Two Decades of Nonprofit Research Through a New Institutional Partnership

The transfer consolidates roughly two decades of social-sector documentation into a permanent institutional collection. Migration is scheduled to complete within the next twelve months.

Archive composition and custodial chain

The collection comprises 36,000+ discrete resources accumulated over 20 years. Submissions originate from nonprofit and philanthropic organizations worldwide. Candid — operating as the Foundation Center prior to its 2019 rebrand — held custodial responsibility throughout the build period. RAC contributes 50+ years of archival practice in philanthropic and nonprofit history. Combined institutional tenure now exceeds 70 years. The RAC acquisition standard requires all accepted material to enter public access at some future point; the standard aligns with IssueLab's open-access mandate and removes the risk of restricted holdings. The two organizations described the collaboration as the first step in an anticipated ongoing partnership.

Sector research implications

The IssueLab inventory documents three primary topic clusters: democracy, evaluation, and climate change. RAC's existing holdings extend the adjacent research perimeter to medicine, science, public health, arts, agriculture, social sciences, urban affairs, and public policy. For NYC-based nonprofit researchers, the documented intersections sit in urban affairs and public policy — categories RAC holds in its existing collection. Candid characterized IssueLab's audience as "a small but dedicated community" with reach limitations; RAC's institutional infrastructure resolves that constraint through cataloguing, discovery layers, and persistent identifier assignment.

Operational checks

• Crosswalk active IssueLab citations to the eventual RAC URL schema once published.
• Prioritize NYC-relevant clusters — urban affairs, public policy, social services — for early review and download.
• Audit internal knowledge bases for IssueLab references requiring metadata update.
• Monitor migration milestones on a quarterly cadence.
• Verify preservation status for priority items at the 6-month and 12-month checkpoints.
• Document any gaps in the migrated collection against pre-transfer IssueLab inventories.
• Confirm the persistent identifier format RAC applies to the migrated corpus.