Remarkable things happen at the water’s edge.
Too often, what makes them possible stays local — in one inbox, one board packet, one season’s handoff. This is a place to collect, test, and share practical knowledge for organizations at the water’s edge.
Start with the friction closest to the work.
What is harder than it should be? What knowledge is trapped in one person, one committee, one system, or one season? What small tool, template, example, or process note would make the next handoff easier?
The measure is usefulness. If it helps the person doing the work, it is evidence. If it can travel to the next organization, it becomes infrastructure.
IRS 990 XML · Harbor Commons · public index
Public records · no subscription
Every number traceable to source filing
Public records · open where safe · provenance kept
We start with questions practitioners keep bumping into.
Not conclusions. Questions. We look for what the public record can tell us — and where it runs out.
Revenue sources, staffing patterns, governance structure, program reach — the IRS corpus covers thousands of organizations across a decade. Most practitioners have never seen the aggregate picture. What does the field look like when you can see it all at once?
How we explore it: IRS 990 XML corpus — 1,500+ organizations in the public index, 14 filing years, 49 states. Revenue, staffing, governance, compensation. Harbor Commons is the public interface.
Some organizations have deep development capacity. Most don’t. That’s not a moral failure — it’s a structural pattern. What conditions produce it? What enables organizations to grow it without compromising access or mission?
How we explore it: Field-capacity scan — role patterns, compensation benchmarks, and capacity signals from public job postings and IRS Part VII records. Methodology forthcoming.
The library sector, community health networks, the open-source community, and environmental education have all developed shared infrastructure for exactly this kind of problem. What translates? What has to be rebuilt for the water’s edge context?
How we explore it: Cross-sector literature review and institutional mapping — library networks, community health, open-source infrastructure, environmental education. Synthesis in progress.
Fundraising playbooks, governance templates, compensation benchmarks, program models — this knowledge exists, but it lives in individual inboxes and departing staff. What would it take to make it field-level infrastructure instead of organizational memory?
How we explore it: Document and pattern analysis — where field knowledge currently lives, what makes it portable, what infrastructure already exists that could carry more of it.
The IRS 990 corpus is public and free. Most organizations in the sector have never accessed it. Peer benchmarking, compensation comparisons, funder pattern analysis — none of this requires a subscription.
How we explore it: Harbor Commons makes public filings easier for practitioners to use directly. The question is what changes when the people closest to the work can read the same record others use to evaluate them.
Appreciative. Evidence-based. Open.
We start with what’s working — not what’s broken. The goal isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a map of what capable organizations have figured out, made legible enough that others can build on it.
We look first at what’s working and why. The field has decades of proof that sailing and waterfront programs produce real outcomes at real scale. Our job is to understand the conditions that make that possible — and to ask what it would take to create more of those conditions.
The IRS corpus, published job postings, peer-reviewed health literature — these tell us structure. They don’t tell us culture, leadership, or what happened in the room when something went right. We use the record to sharpen the questions we bring to practitioners, not to replace the conversation.
Other fields have solved adjacent problems. We find those analogs, name them without jargon, and test what translates. The sailing ecosystem already practices shared infrastructure — race rules, certification standards, safety frameworks — and that instinct can extend to organizational knowledge.
The openness is the demonstration, not a values statement. Public methods, documented provenance, and dated research notes are how the practice gets tested — by being usable, contestable, and citable outside Full Harbor. If someone working in libraries, parks, or a volunteer committee can use what’s here without asking permission, the practice is working.
No organization is named as a research subject without prior relationship and consent. Findings are written in language practitioners can use, not language only researchers can parse. The appreciative frame is research ethics as much as posture.
Designed for organizations operating on thin margins.
Useful without a data team, a grant writer, or a long implementation cycle.
A free public index of 1,500+ sailing clubs and waterfront nonprofits, built entirely from IRS 990 XML filings. Every organization page includes a Financial Report — a multi-year longitudinal analysis of revenue, expenses, reserves, and capacity signals, generated automatically from the organization’s own public filings. No account. No subscription. Every number traces to a specific IRS filing.
Browse organizations and view their Financial Reports ↗
A structured analysis of the sailing sector’s organizational labor market — role patterns, compensation benchmarks, capacity signals across hundreds of posted positions and years of IRS compensation records. Published in stages as findings are confirmed. Methodology documented for replication.
Active inquiries and published artifacts.
Updated as work ships.
1,500+ sailing and waterfront nonprofits indexed from IRS 990 XML. Free public access. No subscription, no login. Every number traces to a specific public filing. The IRS data lag runs 6–18 months; Harbor Commons reflects what has been filed and published, says so when data is absent, and never interpolates.
A free, automatically generated longitudinal financial report for any sailing organization in the corpus. Assembled from the organization’s full IRS 990/990-EZ filing history: operating margin, months of operating cash, reserve ratio, leverage, revenue concentration, and program expense ratio — each computed from the organization’s own sworn filings, with form-depth honesty (990 and 990-EZ produce different detail; the report says so explicitly rather than fabricating missing lines). Exports to Markdown, CSV, plain text, or PDF — client-side, no login.
Designed for the volunteer treasurer inheriting years of filings, the board preparing for a capital discussion, and the incoming officer who needs the financial arc before the first meeting.
EIN resolution and 990 filing analysis applied to a sailing grantee portfolio. Multi-year financial panel, compensation benchmarks, org-size distribution. Method documented for reuse on any grantee portfolio. Findings: the field is more structurally diverse than a single narrative can hold.
Three parallel inquiries underway: a field-capacity scan of how sailing nonprofits staff and sustain programs (role patterns, compensation benchmarks, IRS Part VII); a cross-sector literature review of shared infrastructure in adjacent fields (libraries, community health, digital commons); and a longitudinal job board archive recovering historical sailing sector postings to distinguish structural patterns from recent anomalies. Public versions of findings forthcoming as work ships.
The sources that shape how we see sailing organizations as community infrastructure.
The Maintainers reframe maintenance and repair as strategic, skilled labor — not the absence of innovation, but the condition that makes real value hold. For the sailing field, this reframe is directly useful: the volunteer who knows where every fitting lives, the ED who has held every institutional relationship for 12 years, the staff member whose departure creates a crisis no one named in advance. This isn’t incidental to mission. It is the infrastructure the mission runs on. The Study Guide is an accessible entry point to nearly a decade of Maintainers research, conference work, and fellowship findings.
Siegel Family Endowment’s whitepaper proposes treating community institutions as layered infrastructure systems — physical, digital, and social dimensions operating together, not in silos. The strongest claim for the sailing sector: organizations are evaluated by program outputs while the underlying infrastructure stack remains underbuilt. Physical infrastructure (fleets, docks, safety assets), digital infrastructure (registration systems, donor records, playbooks), and social infrastructure (trust, volunteer culture, peer learning) all co-exist and all need maintenance. Cutting one while funding another is not a cost-saving measure — it is a slow structural failure.
The 2×25 Review — drawing on approximately 2,500 responses from 68 countries — is the most comprehensive examination of equity, inclusion, and lived experience in sailing since 2019. Sixty-five percent of all respondents report experiencing some form of discrimination. Among women, 75% still believe gender balance is a problem — down from 80% in the 2019 World Sailing Trust Strategic Review, but barely moved. More than 85% of women report sexism as the most prevalent form. The median pay gap sits at 29%: women earning $35,000 annually, men $49,000. Structural and cultural barriers identified in 2019 remain largely unchanged at the club and pathway level, even as elite visibility has improved.
A field read on development, stewardship, and field capacity in American sailing. The work exists. The gap is how it is described, measured, and connected to the capital that is actively looking for it. Draws on Cerulli’s $124 trillion wealth-transfer projections, IRC §4942, Fan et al. (2025), Njeri et al. (2025), and White et al. (2019) — and makes a direct argument about what NGB-level development capacity can accomplish for the field when it is pointed at both jobs at once.
Why how an organization tells its story is a structural variable, not a marketing exercise. A practitioner framework for fundraising, retention, and field credibility — built from the WHOLE framework (Solutions Journalism Network), Green and Brock’s narrative transportation research, and two named working examples from Fort Worth Boat Club and Willamette Sailing Club. The stewardship section draws on the immersive experience work of Bobby Anspach to illustrate why appreciation — not persuasion — is the mechanism sustained attention produces.