How it was built, and what it can and can't tell you
Corridor is a research dataset on what drives executive-director turnover in Philadelphia's Community Development Corporations. It tracks 70 CDCs from public records.
Where the data comes from
Each organization is matched to its IRS employer identification number, then enriched with every digitized Form 990 on file through the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, which also supplies the current officer and board roster from Part VII. Recent news comes from Google News. Every source is public and free.
What it does well
Current leadership. For 47 organizations the tracker names the executive director and lists the full officer and board roster from the latest Form 990 Part VII. Titles carrying a “(To MM/YYYY)” note are officers the filing recorded on their way out, a documented transition.
Tax credit participation. 39 CDCs are matched to the City of Philadelphia's CDC Tax Credit program, with the year each entered and its annual contribution, parsed from the City's annual reports (2015, 2019, 2020). This is a funding-and-activity record independent of the 990s, and it reaches organizations that do not file their own.
The actual Form 990 documents. Every organization links to each year's original Form 990 PDF, 905 in all, so the source is one click away rather than a citation.
Structural size and operational lifespan. The Form 990 history reaches back roughly two decades for most organizations, with revenue, expenses, assets, and staff counts each year. When filings stop, that is a strong signal of dormancy or dissolution.
News and primary sources. Each organization links to its own website, its ProPublica filings, and recent Google News coverage, with 283 articles gathered across the roster. Reported executive changes usually show up here first.
Transition leads. A year-over-year jump of 30 percent or more in total officer compensation often marks an executive-director change, since a new director usually arrives at a different salary. The tracker flags those years so the manual lookup starts where a transition most likely happened. It is a lead, not proof.
The honest limitation
Leadership names are current, not a full year-by-year history. Director names for each past year live in Part VII of that year's 990, and as of 2026 there is no free, lightweight way to pull them at scale: the AWS 990 mirror was retired at the end of 2021, the IRS per-file XML URLs now 404, and ProPublica blocks scripted PDF downloads. So for historical changes the tracker pairs the current executive with the pay-shift years (when a change most likely happened) and the news links (where the named change is reported).
The spreadsheet
Everything here is also a formatted spreadsheet, downloadable from the home page, with sheets for the roster, leadership, financial history, news, and signals. It is built from the same data as this site in one step, so the two never drift.
The review pile
10 organizations could not be matched to an IRS record with confidence. Acronym-named groups and fiscally sponsored districts land here. They are left unmatched rather than tied to a wrong EIN, because a wrong match silently corrupts the data. They appear under the “Needs lookup” filter on the organizations page.
Data snapshot 2026-06-24. Re-running the scraper refreshes against the latest IRS filings.