Summary
The City and County of San Francisco contracts with hundreds of nonprofit organizations to provide services for San Franciscans. These services include healthcare, legal aid, shelter, children’s programming, and more. This dataset contains all payments issued to nonprofit organizations by City departments since FY2019. This dataset will be updated at the close of each fiscal year. The underlying data is pulled from Supplier Payments on SF OpenBook. Please use SF OpenBook to find current-year data.
The data in this dataset are presented in easy-to-read dashboards on our website. View the dashboards here: https://www.sf.gov/data/san-francisco-nonprofit-contracts-and-spending.
How the dataset is created
The Controller’s Office performs several significant data cleaning steps before uploading this dataset to the SF Open Data Portal. Please read the cleaning steps below:
Cleaning Steps
1. SF OpenBook provides a filter labeled “Non-Profits Only” (Yes, No), and resulting datasets exported from SF OpenBook include a “Non Profit” column to indicate whether the supplier is a nonprofit (Yes, Blank). However, this field is not always accurate and excludes about 150 known nonprofits that are not labeled as a nonprofit in the City’s financial system. To ensure a complete dataset, we exported a full list of supplier payment data from SF OpenBook with the “Non-Profits Only” field filtered to “No” which provides a list of all supplier payments regardless of nonprofit status. We cleaned this data by adding a new “Nonprofit” column within the dataset and used this column to note a nonprofit status of “Yes” for approximately 150 known nonprofit suppliers without this indicator flagged in the financial system in addition to any nonprofits already accurately flagged in the system. We then filtered the full dataset using the new nonprofit column and used the filtered data for all of the dashboards on the webpage linked above. The list of excluded nonprofits may change over time as information gets updated in the City’s data system. Download the cleaned and updated dataset on the City’s Open Data Portal, which includes all of the known nonprofits.
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While the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is technically not-for-profit, a university’s financial management is very different from traditional nonprofit service providers, and the City’s agreement with UCSF includes hospital staffing in addition to contracted services to the public. As such, the Controller's Office created a nonprofit column to be able to exclude payments to UCSF when reporting on overall spending. There are divisions of UCSF that provide more traditional contracted services, but these cannot be clearly identified in the data. Note that filtering out this data may reflect an underrepresentation of overall spending.
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The Controller's Office also excludes several specific contracts that are predominately “pass through” payments where the nonprofit provider receives funds that they disperse to other agencies, such as for childcare or workforce subsidies. These types of contracts are substantially different from contracts where the nonprofit is providing direct services to San Franciscans.
Update process
This dataset will be manually updated after year-end financial processing is complete, typically in September. There may be a delay between the end of the fiscal year and the publication of this dataset.
