What financial filings and IRS Form 990s reveal about The People’s Forum and its donors?
Executive summary
The People’s Forum’s publicly available Form 990s and related filings show the nonprofit’s basic financial architecture—revenues, expenses, grants, officers, and some program detail—as assembled and republished by databases like ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer IRS990" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">[1] [2] [3], but those filings do not reveal most donor identities because IRS rules and recent procedures permit redaction or non-disclosure of contributors for many exempt organizations [4] [5]. Public records therefore permit scrutiny of budgets, compensation, and grantmaking patterns but place clear legal limits on tracing who gives money to the organization from the tax filings alone [6] [7].
1. What the 990s actually show: finance, people and program
The Form 990s available through ProPublica and the IRS reconstruct line-item financials—gross receipts, program service revenue, grants paid, functional expense breakdowns, and executive compensation—so readers can see how much the People’s Forum took in, how it allocated spending between programs, administration and fundraising, and who sat on its board or was listed as key staff [1] [8] [3] [9]; nonprofit databases compile these filings into searchable summaries that include schedules and attachments where present [1] [3].
2. What Schedule attachments can reveal (and what they rarely reveal publicly)
Schedules on the 990—such as Schedule I for grants to other organizations or Schedule O for narrative explanations—can disclose the Forum’s funding relationships and grant recipients, and ProPublica hosts those schedules when they’re filed, allowing examination of where the organization directs dollars and what programs it funds [10] [3]; however, while schedules may identify institutions that received grants, they typically do not and are not required to disclose the names and addresses of individual contributors for most nonprofits other than private foundations or certain political filers [4] [6].
3. Donor transparency: legal limits and the 2018 change
The legal framework is decisive: the IRS has long treated contributor names and addresses on Schedule B as non-public for most exempt organizations, and a 2018 IRS revenue procedure formalized the relaxation of public disclosure for many filers so the IRS (and not the public) retains donor lists in examinations, meaning public 990s will often be redacted or omit donor names entirely [4] [5]. That policy shift and the statutory regime mean that reading a People’s Forum Form 990 will seldom produce a roster of major individual backers; investigators must rely on other sources—press releases, annual reports, state filings, or voluntary disclosures—to map donor networks [6] [7].
4. What secondary data reveals about grant focus and geographic priorities
Third-party aggregators that analyze 990 data, like Instrumentl, summarize the People’s Forum’s grant-making emphases—reporting recent focuses on human services, arts, culture and humanities, and noting typical award sizes and geographic concentrations described in the filings or in derived datasets—so while donor identities remain opaque, philanthropic priorities and grant sizes are visible through these compiled 990 data [11] [1].
5. How to corroborate or push beyond what the 990s disclose
Form 990s should be treated as the starting point: they document program spending, officer names, and institutional grant recipients and are public records available via IRS search, ProPublica or by request from the organization or IRS [3] [7], but because donor names are generally protected, a full picture of who funds the Forum requires triangulation—news reporting, grants databases, grant agreements, donor-funded program disclosures, and state-level filings—none of which is guaranteed to be available in the tax record alone [6] [7].
6. Limits, motives and the risks of overreach
Any implication that a 990 should unambiguously identify major funders misreads both law and practice: the IRS’s nondisclosure rules and the 2018 procedural change mean that the absence of listed donors in the People’s Forum filings is expected rather than evidentiary of secrecy or wrongdoing [4] [5]; conversely, organizations can and do use the legitimate redaction tools to shield contributors for privacy or safety reasons, while critics may frame the same redactions as deliberate opacity—an interpretive tension that must be acknowledged when using Form 990s to make claims about influence or funding sources [6] [5].
7. Bottom line
The People’s Forum’s public Form 990s, as collected by ProPublica and similar services, reveal organizational finances, governance, and grantmaking patterns but do not reliably disclose donor identities because IRS rules permit nondisclosure of contributor names for most exempt organizations; to identify donors beyond what the 990s show requires additional public records or voluntary disclosures not contained in the tax filings [1] [4] [5] [3].