Unhistoric Acts Foundation exists to make the ordinary record of public life durable, legible, and useful to the people whose lives it shapes.
Much of civic life is decided far from national attention: in packets, agendas, minutes, ordinances, notices, and administrative records. These documents are the memory of public institutions. They show what was proposed, what evidence was considered, who participated, and what happened next.
Yet public does not always mean accessible. Records are often dispersed across unstable systems, published in formats that resist search, and stripped of the context a reader needs to understand them. We work on that gap.
“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”George Eliot, Middlemarch
What we believe
Access is more than availability.
A buried PDF may satisfy a publishing requirement while remaining functionally invisible. Meaningful access requires preservation, discoverability, structure, and context.
Public infrastructure should outlast attention cycles.
We favor patient, maintainable work over novelty for its own sake. The measure is not whether a system is impressive at launch, but whether people can still depend on it years later.
Tools should lead people back to evidence.
Editorial interpretation and automated systems can help readers navigate complexity. They should also make sources clearer, keep uncertainty visible, and preserve a direct path to the underlying record.
How we choose our work
Our approach is informed by evidence-oriented philanthropy without reducing public life to a single formula. We ask whether a problem matters, whether it is neglected, whether a practical intervention can improve it, and whether our contribution is genuinely additional. We also ask who bears the consequences, what local knowledge we may be missing, and whether the work strengthens public agency.
Our public promise
We will be candid about what our work can and cannot show. We will distinguish source material from interpretation. We will prefer open formats, document our methods, protect sensitive information, and make correction part of the product rather than an afterthought.