IRS-recognized 501(c)(3) public charity · EIN 45-5531363 Chicago, Illinois · admin@charityforallchicago.org

Transparency · Organizational update

Our commitment to transparency, and what we publish

Most charity websites lead with impact. We lead with facts you can verify, because trust that cannot be checked is not really trust at all.

Volunteers of different ages packing boxes of food with the Chicago skyline visible behind them
Our work is small and local. We would rather you see it clearly than imagine it larger than it is.

When you land on a nonprofit website, you are usually greeted by big numbers: meals served, lives changed, percentages of every dollar that reach the mission. Those numbers are persuasive, which is exactly why they deserve scrutiny. A number is only as trustworthy as the method behind it, and methods are rarely shown.

We decided to build this site the other way around. Before we tell you anything about impact, we tell you who we are in terms you can independently confirm.

What we publish, and why

On our financials and transparency page, you will find the facts that define us as a legal entity:

  • Our legal name, Charity for All, and our EIN, 45-5531363.
  • Our federal tax status: exempt under section 501(c)(3).
  • Our public charity classification, 170(b)(1)(A)(vi).
  • Our exemption effective date, April 23, 2012.
  • Our current annual filing, the Form 990-N, and our December 31 fiscal year end.

Every one of those can be checked against public IRS records. None of them requires you to take our word for anything.

Why facts come before impact

We are a small organization. The honest signal of that is our filing: the Form 990-N is available to organizations with gross receipts of not more than $50,000. Publishing inflated impact claims on top of that reality would be a contradiction, and contradictions are how trust quietly dies.

So here is our standard. We will not present a statistic on this website unless we can substantiate it and explain how we measured it. When real, documented results exist, they will appear here, dated, with the method attached. Until then, we describe our commitments and our focus areas, which is an honest account of an organization at our stage.

Trust that cannot be checked is not trust. It is marketing.

Hold us to it

If you ever find a claim on this site that we do not back up, tell us. We would rather correct the record than benefit from a misunderstanding. That invitation is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the whole point of publishing verifiable information in the first place.

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