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 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 are guaranteed the following for the lifetime of their membership:

• A permanently price-locked rate of $3 per month or $30 per year
• No future price increases — not for inflation, not for scale, not for institutional restructuring
• No forced upgrades
• No conversion to a one-time "lifetime access" buyout
• No expiration of Founding Member status while the account remains active

This guarantee supersedes all future pricing changes. If pricing tiers, products, or access structures change in the future, Founding Members retain full access at their locked rate.

Founding Members are guaranteed access parity with the highest individual membership tier offered by NFA. This means:

• Founding Members will never receive less access than later members
• New learning tools, curriculum features, or platform capabilities made available to individual members will be included for Founding Members at no additional charge
• Access parity does not imply exclusivity — it does not restrict access for others

The following content is permanently free and will never be paywalled — for anyone:

• Canonical essays — core and expanded
• Subject biographies and historical narratives
• Era and domain overviews
• Bibliographies, citations, and source lists
• Licensed images and archival materials
• Optional open educational resources used as background support

This constitutes NFA's public knowledge commons. Payment covers structure and pedagogy — never access to history itself. If NFA ever considers moving canonical content behind a paywall, that change must be announced publicly with a minimum of 90 days notice and may apply only to new content — never retroactively to content already published as free.

NFA will not serve advertising within curriculum. 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.

This Covenant survives platform redesigns, rebranding, and leadership changes. It survives institutional restructuring, mergers, or successor entities — or is honored through equivalent guarantees. It remains in force unless voluntarily terminated by the Founding Member through account cancellation.

This Covenant does not grant equity, profit sharing, ownership interest, governance rights, or voting rights. It is a contractual and ethical commitment governing access and pricing only.

NFA commits to a permanent system of open access windows that ensures Free Members can engage meaningfully with the full curriculum every month:

• Monthly Open Day (Day 1 of every calendar month): Free Members receive access to all content across all eras and all curriculum pathways for one full day. Downloads, certificates, and persistent mastery records are excluded.
• Monthly Rotating Era Window (Days 1–5 of every month): Free Members receive access to one full rotating era plus the first lesson of the immediately following era. The rotation advances chronologically each month, beginning with Era 1 (Pre-Contact & Classical Africa) on March 1 and continuing in perpetuity.

The rotation schedule is locked. Selective release never applies to canonical historical knowledge — only to curriculum pacing, structured pathways, and convenience tools.

NFA is committed to building toward the full 1,244-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 confident claims that exceed the evidence.

The absence of evidence is itself a structural fact. NFA will name it as such rather than manufacture false certainty about subjects the archive deliberately erased.

NFA commits that editorial decisions will be made on the basis of historical evidence and educational quality — not political palatability, donor pressure, or audience convenience. Subjects whose historical positions are morally complex will be analyzed with the same rigor as those who are unambiguously celebrated.

The following are permanently prohibited — not subject to future policy changes, governance decisions, or board votes:

• Paywalling canonical historical knowledge or primary narratives
• Advertising or sponsored curriculum within the platform
• Requiring open educational resources for mastery — OER is always optional and support-only
• Public leaderboards or competitive ranking systems
• Gamified experience point economies
• User-generated curriculum content entering the canonical record
• Silent access downgrades — any reduction in member access must be announced explicitly
• Converting NFA into a partisan, ideological, or political organ

Founding Members hold explicit moral standing to raise objections if any of these commitments are violated.

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.

The Founding Member Covenant provisions are non-revocable. In any case of conflict between this Covenant and any future governance document, the Covenant prevails.