Blog #7: Post-Mortem of a Nonprofit
01 March 2026
Overview
I discuss my role as co-founder and director of Education Equity Mentorship Company, a nonprofit providing free tutoring and college prep to students facing financial hardships. As of February 2026, we dissolved the organization, so I reflect on what went well, what went wrong, and lessons learned for future endeavors.
Beginnings
I tutored while in undergrad, and the positive feedback loop started to irk me. Families with greater means could pay for private tutors, so their kids tended to get better grades and higher standardized test scores, which made it easier for them to get into better colleges, which made it easier to get high-earning jobs, which made it easier for them to pay for private tutors for their kids, ad infinitum.
No one can blame parents for wanting the best for their children; I hope to be a high-earner, and I intend to do everything I can to give my future children the best opportunities. Regardless, free tutoring could help even the playing field for students who couldn't afford private tutors.
In 2022, I reached out to a group of fellow UMass Amherst alums and asked if they would join me in founding a nonprofit called Education Equity Mentorship Company. They agreed. Our organization provided free tutoring and college prep to middle school and high school students facing financial hardships.
Depending on when you read this, our website may still be up at www.e2mentors.org, but as of February 2026, we have dissolved the organization.
What Went Well
At first, the excitement of a new organization with a positive mission drove activity. We designed the website, built social media presence, recruited volunteers, distributed flyers, and signed up students. We had a small but steady stream of students who benefited from our services.
We also fundraised several thousand dollars, which gave our tiny organization years of runway. I tried to have my hands in everything at first, but I learned to delegate and encourage ownership of solutions. We used a Slack workspace for most communications with formal meetings once every two weeks.
I'm especially proud of how happy families and students were with our services. Here are some testimonials:
"James and his entire team are incredible! Our son started working with James a year ago, and we can’t thank him enough for being a dedicated mentor and equipping him with just the right tools to prepare for SAT/ACT. Our son is a rising high school senior; we’ve seen his grades improve! He widened his perspective about his future career, all thanks to the conversations with James about college. This is a unique organization and one I can’t recommend enough!"
"My high school daughter has been working with her tutor for over a year now. It’s been incredibly helpful for her to support her own study skills. Her tutor has been able to keep up-to-date on what she has studying and reinforce what she is learning in the classroom. It’s been a huge benefit entering her freshman year and we plan to continue!"
"This company is outstanding. James has been so helpful and truly a great mentor to my son. As a single mom I appreciate what Education Equity Mentorship Company has done for me and my son. James has been working with my son to boost his SAT scores and they are going up! My son actually looks forward to his tutoring session every week as they are both fully engaged and patient in the learning experience. James is great with giving my son academic advice to further enhance his learning on the off days from tutoring. I highly recommend applying for this program I can’t say enough great things about this program. Keep up the good work team!"
Perhaps our best innovation was offering paid services to families who could afford it, and using that revenue to subsidize free services for families who couldn't. To avoid any legal headaches, we only used documented examples of financial hardship like free/reduced lunch status, EBT cards, or Pell grants.
We avoided using protected factors like race, ethnicity, or gender to select students so as not to earn the ire of a certain administration. This may sound paranoid for a small nonprofit, but I was asked by the NIH to clarify that this was the case prior to a grant disbursement, so I wanted to be extra careful.
What Went Wrong
I naively thought that giving away a valuable service for free would be enough to attract a steady stream of students, but that was not the case. We put in a lot of work to get the word out and recruit students, and it still did not lead to steady growth.
Volunteer interest waned with the lack of student engagement, so we ended up with a few people doing most of the work. I would send requests into the Slack or assign tasks in meetings, but there was no accountability. We were all unpaid, busy volunteers, and I had no appetite to crack the whip on my friends.
We largely relied on online engagement, which slowed to a trickle. If this was my full time job, I would've gone grassroots and sought out partnerships, but this was all on top of my PhD. As my research became more succesful, I spent more time cranking experiments, writing grants and papers, presenting at conferences, and so on, which left less time for the nonprofit. I still tutored students every week, but I had no time to commit to growth, which would have demanded even more attention if succesful.
The death knell came when I started a part-time job with a biotech building machine learning pipelines. What little time I had left was eaten up. With momentum slowing over the previous two years, I decided to dissolve the organization. I met with the other two board members and they agreed.
On 15 February 2026, we officially dissolved Education Equity Mentorship Company, donating our remaining funds to an aligned charity called Bottom Line.
Lessons Learned
Looking back on the students we helped, the thousands we donated, and the job referrals I made for team members as the director, it's hard to say I regret making the organization.
But I made foundational mistakes. Here's what I learned:
First and foremost, if there are organizations trying to achieve the same goal that are already well-established and growing, it's probably better to donate time and money to those organizations rather than trying to start a new one. This was certainly the case for Education Equity. Effective altruists would say I would've been better off boosting my income with a specialist part-time job and donating to one of these organizations.
Similarly, Yale has several organizations doing similar work that I volunteer for (see Blog #3). Align your expertise with your service! I am not an expert nonprofit admin, but I am a scientist and a good teacher, so I should've sought organizations that allowed me to focus solely on those aspects.
For the sake of argument, let's pretend starting Education Equity was a good idea. What would I do differently? I wouldn't have the organization be made entirely of friends. I don't want to compromise friendships with either my team falling short on commitments or me disciplining them. And without compensation, what would discipline really look like?
This brings me to the next fix: pay the tutors for their work, myself included. We are all young people in med school, PhDs, and so on. Read: we are broke and drowning in work. Pay would have incentivized recruiting efforts, our major bottleneck. We had the funds to pay $40/hour for quite a long time, especially with some students from wealthier families paying for services. It was wasteful to just sit on our donations, which went to another charity in the end.
As for accountability, I quickly learned to assign tasks to individual people. The bystander effect is powerfully subversive. Reach out individually, get a yes or no, get a timeline, and follow up.
Finally, I would have sought out partnerships with schools and community centers early on. The more you can rely on free marketing, the better. Also, it delivers an immediate credibility boost because Education Equity is being recommended by an organization the recipients already know and trust. We did casually try this a few times, but it should've been a top priority.
Final Thoughts
Sometimes, I would feel sick with guilt that I wasn't doing enough for Education Equity. This was not fair to myself, nor was it productive. I'm proud of what we accomplished, and I am so grateful to our volunteers, donors, and students for making it possible. It wasn't perfect, but we made a real impact. I still keep in touch with some of the students now in college, one of which boosted his SAT score by over 300 points through our sessions! I hope they will continue the spirit of the program and help others in the future.
Hopefully, this post-mortem will help anyone considering starting a nonprofit. In most cases, an established organization is likely making great progress in the area you seek to improve. Find a way to amplify your expertise and align yourself with the mission. For example, a cancer research or programming nonprofit would've allowed me to overlap my career and volunteer efforts.
Helping others is a noble pursuit, but that doesn't excuse inefficiency.
- James