Code Swaraj
Likewise, Gil Elbaz and his wife Elyssa, a former Assistant U.S. attorney, have supported us every year since we started. Gil’s company had been purchased by Google just before the IPO and they have been quite generous with their winnings, funding a variety of important nonprofits.
I put these names on my “about” page for Public Resource, along with the names of the nine law firms who represent us, our contractors, and our board. As a non-profit, like a government or any other public organization, I feel we have an obligation to be fully open about who we are and where we get our money and I practice what I preach. We have stringent conflict of interest, whistleblower, use of funds, financial controls, and other corporate policies and have received a Gold Seal from GuideStar, a nonprofit monitoring group.
Even with this generous support, money has always been tight. In 2016, I furloughed myself for eight of the 12 months in order to pay my contractors. I had been happy to be back on salary for 2017, but after the foundation flaked out, I once again called the payroll company and told them we wouldn’t be paying my salary from December on.
One of the reasons I don’t hire a large staff (indeed. I’m the only actual employee) is because the money has always been irregular and by keeping our core expenses very low, we can survive times of drought.
Make no mistake about it, though. While I may be the only employee, Public Resource is a real honest-to-god government-certified non-profit organization operating at enterprise scale and serving millions of people. We have always had a distinguished and very helpful board of directors, some of the best contractors in the business, and because of my deep roots in the Internet, I’m able to take advantage of hosting, offices, and other facilities that would make any well-funded Silicon Valley startup envious.
When we do receive large grants, rather than hire up lots of staff, I spend the money on capital expenses, such as the $600,000 spent buying U.S. Court of Appeal opinions, the $250,000 spent buying public safety codes, or the $300,000 spent paying the Internet Archive to scan 3.5 million pages of briefs from the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals dating back to the court’s founding in 1891.
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