Why I started gleantree

I've spent about thirty years working with data — building the pipelines and models that turn raw records into something people can actually act on. Over that time I've come to realize: there's an enormous amount of untapped value in public datasets, and most people never realize it — either because they don't think to look, or because the data isn't in a form they can use. Form 990s are a perfect example. Every nonprofit and foundation files one with the IRS each year — who gives, how much, to whom, and how it's changed. Tens of thousands of them. Public, free, and in theory searchable.

In practice, nobody looks. The interesting parts are buried in scanned PDFs and giant data dumps, so the information is available without being accessible. That gap — between public and usable — is the opportunity I started gleantree to close.

We call the things we pull out of that gap Gleanings: a fact that was always there, that nobody bothered to find, framed so it's useful to you. Most weeks this email brings a handful — a foundation making its largest grant in a decade, a funder that's quietly gone dormant, a giving pattern that just moved. Each one traces back to a real filing you can check yourself.

I'll also use this space each week to step back from the specific findings and talk about the bigger picture — how to read a 990 without getting fooled, how gleantree examines where nonprofit money is really moving, and now and then a story from someone who used a Gleaning or the Non-profit Workbench to land a grant. Please reply with any feedback or suggestions you have — I personally read every email.