Ten volumes · November 2026
You already know what you want to build.
Turning that passion into an organization that exists, and survives its first few years, means becoming the administrator of the thing you care about.
The Founder’s Library is a collection of ten books that cover everything you need to know as a new Founder. You bring your passion, we’ll lead you through the details, and help you create something that will outlast the hard work you put into it.
- IFounding & Mission
- IIBuilding Awareness
- IIIMeasuring Impact
- IVFundraising
- VBudgeting & Finance
- VIHiring Your First Employee
- VIIBoard & Governance
- VIIILegal & Compliance
- IXSustainability
- XTemplates & Examples
Each volume treats one part of the work in full, and no volume repeats another. Ebook editions publish first; print editions follow.
Free when you join the list
Every Document a New Nonprofit Needs
Articles, bylaws, minutes, the exemption application, the policies, the filings. The whole sequence a new organization has to produce, in the order it arrives.
What is in them
What you actually get.
There is no shortage of writing that tells a founder their cause matters. There is very little that tells them what a bylaw does, when the state expects to hear from them, or how to know whether the program works.
Three organizations, followed all the way through
A literacy program, a diaper bank and a community kitchen appear in every volume, at every stage, from the first filing to the year somebody has to be let go. By Book Five you know their numbers well enough to argue with them.
Every chapter ends in a case study
An organization that got something wrong, the decision as it looked at the time, and what it cost. The failures are presented as reasonable decisions, because that is nearly always what they were.
The paperwork, printed in full
The tenth volume reproduces the finished documents of those three organizations, annotated: articles, bylaws, minutes, budgets, policies, a mission statement shown in three successive drafts. These are working documents, not blank templates.
It tells you where it cannot help
Where a rule varies by state, or moves, the book says so and names who sets it. Where a question needs a professional, it says that too, and tells you what to have ready before you pay for the hour.
Who this is for
People starting from nothing but conviction.
You have never done this before
Nobody is born knowing what a bylaw is, and most writing on this subject forgets that. These books start at the beginning and explain the vocabulary the first time it appears.
You are the whole organization
One person holding the program, the fundraising, the books and the board. That describes most of the sector and almost none of the literature.
You would rather be told the truth
Including the parts that are tedious, the parts that cost money, and the parts where the honest answer is that it depends on your state.
Who this is from
Twenty years in small organizations.
Ike Wayne has spent twenty years inside small nonprofits, the kind with one paid person, a board that meets four times a year, and a founder who is also the bookkeeper, the grant writer and the person who unlocks the building.
These volumes are written from that, and for it. Nothing in them assumes a development director, a finance team, or counsel on retainer, because the organizations they are written for have none of those things and are not going to get them soon.
Before November
Start with the paperwork.
Join the list and Every Document a New Nonprofit Needs comes to you now: the whole sequence a new organization has to produce, in the order it arrives.
You will be told the day the set publishes. Ebook editions come first, and print editions follow.