The Founding Member Covenant

Not A Footnote Academy is a curriculum platform built around the Black men, women, and communities who shaped history but were written out of it. Every subject in the NFA library is a documented person or event — analyzed with rigor, taught with honesty, and calibrated for every level of learner.

NFA's analytical foundation is PSWA — Phenomenological-Structural Worldview Analysis — a six-layer framework that trains learners to read power, evidence, and structural constraint the way historians actually do.

The mission is not advocacy. It is not celebration. It is education grounded in evidence — which means treating every subject as a full human being operating inside real structural constraints, and refusing to flatten, mythologize, or simplify what the record actually shows.

NFA will incorporate as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) under Arizona law. The PBC form legally requires the organization to balance financial interests against its stated public benefit purpose. Mission is not a marketing claim — it is a legal obligation encoded in the corporate charter.

No payment will be collected from any waitlist member until NFA formally incorporates as a Public Benefit Corporation. Submission of a waitlist form constitutes an expression of interest only — it creates no financial obligation on either party.

Founding Members who join at the Founder's Rate will hold that rate for their first 24 consecutive months. It will not increase with inflation. It will not increase when NFA scales. It will not be renegotiated when the institutional structure changes.

The rate lock is not a promotion. It is a record of when you joined and what that meant. The founding rate will be honored for as long as NFA exists as an institution, under any ownership or governance structure for the named time period.

Founding Members will have full access to all NFA content at their tier — not a restricted subset, not a legacy tier that is quietly depreciated. If NFA creates new content categories, Founding Members will have access to them at no additional cost unless the new category represents a substantively different product category, in which case NFA will notify Founding Members clearly and explicitly, not through terms-of-service language.

Historical facts and primary narratives — the canonical record of who a subject was and what they did — will never be paywalled. Our curated Open Educational Resources,which includes our Science, Mathematics, English Language Arts, Social Studies and Traditional History curriculum will never be paywalled. Payment covers structure, sequencing, analytical scaffolding, and assessment tools that are the exclusive intellectual property of Not A Footnote Academy — never access to history itself.

This is a permanent commitment, not a current policy that can be changed in a future terms update. If NFA ever considers moving canonical content behind a paywall, that change must be announced publicly, with a minimum of 90 days notice, and applied only to new content — not retroactively to content already published as free.

NFA will not serve advertising. NFA will not sell member data to third parties. NFA will not use member data for purposes other than delivering the educational product members have enrolled for.

This is not a current privacy policy subject to amendment. It is a covenant commitment — breaking it would constitute a material violation of the terms under which Founding Members joined.

NFA is committed to building toward the full 1,200+ subject library. The 14 foundational subjects are a proof of concept — the quality standard and analytical framework that will be applied to every subject that follows. This is a multi-year undertaking. NFA will publish its progress publicly.

Every NFA essay will cite its sources. Every claim will be grounded in documented evidence. Where the historical record is incomplete, ambiguous, or contested, NFA will say so explicitly — not paper over the gap with speculation or with confident claims that exceed the evidence.

This commitment is especially important for the subjects who were deliberately erased from the archive. The absence of evidence is itself a structural fact. NFA will name it as such rather than manufacture false certainty.

NFA commits that its editorial decisions will be made on the basis of historical evidence and educational quality — not on the basis of political palatability, donor pressure, or audience convenience. Subjects whose historical positions are morally complex will be analyzed with the same rigor as subjects who are unambiguously celebrated. The measure of intellectual integrity is whether NFA treats difficult cases honestly.

This document is published publicly and permanently. It can be cited, referenced, and held against NFA by anyone — members, journalists, scholars, critics, or the public. NFA welcomes that accountability. An institution that cannot be held to its founding commitments is not an institution — it is a brand.

If NFA ever materially violates a commitment stated in this Covenant, Founding Members are entitled to a full refund of all payments made, and NFA is obligated to publish a public accounting of the violation and the circumstances that produced it.