Best place to begin your grant search

The Foundation Center is a national service organization created and supported by foundations. It provides a single authoritative source of information on foundation giving. Its publications have been called the yellow pages of nonprofit philanthropy, while its libraries are any grant seeker's one-stop shopping mall.

Publications of the Foundation Center are the primary working tools of any serious grant seeker. Complete information on all private and community foundations actively engaged in grantmaking, regardless of size or geographic location, can be found in them.

They provide three categories of information for the grant seeker:

* Directories that describe specific foundations, characterizing their program interests and providing fiscal and personnel data.

* Grant indexes that list and classify by area of interest recent foundation awards.

* Guides and related materials that introduce a grant seeker to funding research, the how-to's of writing a proposal, and general-purpose information on nonprofit organizations.

Through its four main libraries, located in New York, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., and its national network of 105 cooperating library collections (call 800-424-9836 for the one nearest you), the Foundation Center operates an extensive public service and education program. The libraries provide free public access to all of the center's publications, plus a wide range of other books, services, periodicals, and research documents relating to foundations and philanthrophy.