how to read a 990-PF

does this foundation accept applications?

Part XIV · Supplementary Information · line 2

The foundation reports its application procedures, restrictions, deadlines, and submission requirements. It also indicates whether it gives only to preselected organizations and does not accept unsolicited requests.

For a grantseeker, this is the quickest first filter. An open application process does not mean a cold proposal is competitive, just as a closed process does not tell you how organizations enter the foundation's network.

how much is it required to distribute?

Parts IX through XII

The five-percent rule is not the same thing as a grant budget. Part IX calculates the foundation's minimum investment return. Part X determines its distributable amount. Part XI records qualifying distributions. Part XII shows undistributed income and excess distributions carried forward from prior years.

Qualifying distributions can include more than grants. Administrative expenses, program-related investments, and certain set-asides can also count toward the obligation. Two things are especially useful when reading a return:

Neither tells you what the foundation will give next year, but both show how the foundation has managed its distribution obligation.

where did the money go?

Part XIV · line 3

Line 3a reports grants paid during the year and line 3b reports grants approved for future payment.

Each itemized grant can include the recipient name and address, relationship to the foundation, foundation status, stated purpose, and amount. However, the recipient organization is not identified by its EIN, which becomes important when trying to connect the grant to other organizational records.

Some foundations provide meaningful detail in the stated purpose section, while others use generic language. Either way, the field records how the foundation described the payment. Turning that description into a subject area requires a layer of interpretation.

who appears to govern it?

Part VII

Part VII lists every officer, director, and trustee, whether or not that person was compensated, along with certain highly compensated employees and certain highly paid contractors. That makes the list more useful for understanding structure than for simply ranking pay.

Look for patterns rather than isolated names: recurring family surnames, institutional affiliations, outside management firms, changes in trustees across years, and the distinction between governing individuals and paid professional support.

Recurring surnames can raise the question of whether giving follows family relationships rather than a published program. A common institutional address may raise the question of whether administration sits with a bank, law firm, or other outside manager. The filing identifies the people and roles involved, but it does not tell you how grant decisions are actually made.

what does the foundation do itself?

Parts VIII-A and XIII

Part VIII-A reports the foundation's largest direct charitable activities. Part XIII contains the tests used by foundations claiming private operating foundation status.

An operating foundation is legally structured to conduct charitable activity itself rather than primarily make grants to others. For a grantseeker, that makes an unsolicited proposal substantially less likely to fit, unless the foundation separately operates an external grant program. Do not infer that from the name. Read the return.

what changed across years?

read the same fields three returns deep

One return is a filing. Several returns read together begin to show behavior. Useful things to compare include:

• total grant dollars
• number of itemized grants
• repeat recipients
• largest grants as a share of total giving
• recipient geography
• undistributed income and excess carryover
• changes in trustees
• changes in application policy

For grant research, these fields usually tell you more about intent than a single year's investment income or expenses. For financial or investigative work, the rest of the return can matter considerably.

there is no recipient EIN

Across aysra's private-foundation grant corpus, there are zero filed recipient EINs. The grants schedule does not provide a recipient-EIN field, so connecting grants to recipient organizations requires matching rather than a direct identifier.

It sounds simple to match the recipient name and location against another organizational record, but names are abbreviated, organizations move, and national organizations have local affiliates. A single organization can appear under several filed forms.

not every grant is itemized

The grants schedule is not always a complete ledger of named recipients, but missing rows do not equal zero giving. Foundations vary in how completely grant detail appears in electronically available attachments.

an address is not a place of impact

The grants schedule reports a recipient address, which is usually an organizational mailing or headquarters address, but it does not tell you where the funded work occurred.

A grant to an organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. may support work in Mississippi. A New York recipient may run a national program. The filing does not distinguish those cases.

Geographic analysis of 990-PF grants therefore describes where recipients are filed, not necessarily where philanthropic dollars ultimately operate.

a 990-PF is retrospective

The return is due the fifteenth day of the fifth month after the foundation's fiscal year closes, and an automatic six-month extension is available. That is up to eleven months after the year closes, before any release interval. By the time a grant appears publicly, the underlying funding decision may be well over a year old.

That makes the grant list evidence of what the foundation funded, not of what it was asked to fund. The same restraint applies to absence. A foundation that has never funded an organization like yours may not have rejected the idea. It may simply never have seen it.