Speaker Bio & Abstract
Foundation Center
USA
BiographyAs a geographer and programmer, Jake Garcia has worked on GIS projects for NASA, Al Gore's Climate Project, the City of New York, and the U.S. Army. At Foundation Center, he builds mapping applications, data visualizations, semantic analysis scripts, and application programming interfaces. In April 2011, Jake was the lead developer on a project that won the Large Organization award in the World Bank's "Apps for Development" contest. He received an M.A. in geography from Hunter College and a B.A. in political science from Brown University.
AbstractFoundation Center (now called “Candid”) tracks over 150,000 foundations and other grantmaking institutions worldwide. These foundations give millions of grants per year to more than 400,000 nonprofits. Our goal is to capture, cleanse, categorize, map, and analyze the data about these organizations and transactions, in order to help foundations make informed decisions about their grantmaking, and to help nonprofits discover funding partners with aligned strategies.
Via Foundation Maps, I will show the spatial and categorical distribution of foundation grantmaking according to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Philanthropy Classification System (PCS). We will also explore a network model that shows how funders and nonprofits are connected to each other according to their SDG activities in different cities and regions around the world.
I will also cover the process of data discovery and how we use machine learning and big data methods to improve and categorize our data.