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 actually 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 — 1,471 organizations in the public index, 13 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. Redacted methodology document in progress.
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.
This is a real constraint we take seriously. Public records are public, but practitioners are people. We work at the aggregate, name patterns rather than organizations, and share methods so others can verify — or challenge — the findings themselves.
How we explore it: Aggregate analysis only, no org named without consent, findings written for practitioner use. This is the operating constraint, not just a posture.
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 actually 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 sailing clubs, waterfront nonprofits, and adjacent organizations — built entirely from IRS 990 XML filings. Financial benchmarks, peer comparisons, officer compensation history, governance patterns. 1,471 organizations indexed across 49 states. Every number traces to a specific public filing. No account needed. No subscription.
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.
A structured deliberative engagement tool for governance decisions. Surfaces where a community genuinely converges, where it splits, and what the fault lines look like — before a capital vote, a governance transition, or a decision that can’t easily be undone. Built on the open-source Polis engine. Earned-revenue; funds the free public infrastructure.
Reusable operational templates for the recurring challenges the sector keeps solving alone: first development campaign, board succession, safety documentation, volunteer management, annual fund design. The goal: every organization’s first attempt starts at version one, not at blank page.
Active inquiries and published artifacts.
Updated as work ships.
1,471 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.
EIN resolution and 990 filing analysis for a major outdoor equity funder’s 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.
A structured inquiry into how sailing and waterfront nonprofits staff, fund, and sustain their programs. Role pattern analysis, compensation benchmarking, and capacity signal taxonomy drawn from years of public job board data and IRS Part VII records. Cross-referenced with adjacent sector analogs. Internal draft complete; redacted public version in progress.
Literature review and institutional mapping across fields that have built shared capacity infrastructure: digital commons, community health, library networks, environmental education. Goal: identify what translates to the water’s edge context and what has to be rebuilt from the specific conditions of the sailing sector.
Using public web archives to recover historical sailing sector job postings and track how role patterns, specialization, and compensation have shifted over time. Goal: distinguish between structural patterns and recent anomalies. Method: Wayback Machine CDX API against publicly archived job board data.
The sources that shaped how we think about the problem.
Annotated for practitioners, not researchers. A curated starting point — not a mirror of the internal knowledge base.
The Maintainers reframe maintenance and repair as strategic, skilled labor — not the absence of innovation, but the condition that makes real value durable. 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.