IssueLab: bringing nonprofit research into focus

IssueLab is an online publishing forum for nonprofit research. Our mission is to more effectively archive, distribute and promote the extensive and diverse body of work being produced by the third sector.

Each year billions of charitable dollars are spent on nonprofit research, research which journalists, policy analysts, legislators, students, activists, and grant makers all rely on to effectively addresses complex social issues. And yet despite the widespread interest in this work and the billions of dollars spent each year to produce it, most nonprofit research remains unpublished, hard to find, underexposed, or archived in issue-specific information silos.

The nonprofit sector clearly needs a better solution than the current piecemeal approach to managing and sharing one of its greatest assets, while journalists, researchers, activists, policy makers, educators, and the general publics need a much better solution for locating and accessing social research across issue areas. IssueLab is that solution.

But IssueLab is not simply an online archive. Our efforts are evenly split between aggregating research on social issues and pushing that research back out to other online communities and end-users. Although ambitious, our goal is to mainstream nonprofit research so that users who may not know anything about nonprofits can still learn from the unique perspective these organizations bring to the study of social issues.

We recognize the nonprofit sector as a vital and valuable source of knowledge and believe that by leveraging technology to broaden access to their findings, IssueLab can help users to better understand complex social issues and further healthy debate and dialogue.

IssueLab is a new dgCivil Society Cooperating Organization

URL:  http://www.issuelab.org

Crisis Group

The International Crisis Group is now generally recognised as the world’s leading independent, non-partisan, source of analysis and advice to governments, and intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations, European Union and World Bank, on the prevention and resolution of deadly conflict.

Added by  Carmen Villegas Caballero  May 9, 2008
Read full summary ››    Email this item