Most nonprofits publish this page once they have something to brag about.
This one is published while every line on it still reads zero. That is the point. A transparency page that only appears after the good news is a marketing asset; a transparency page that starts at nothing and is never taken down is a record.
Miftah Foundation does not legally exist. It is not incorporated in California or anywhere else, it has no EIN and no bank account, and no application for recognition of federal charitable tax exemption has been filed with the IRS — nothing is pending.
Nothing given to it is deductible on anyone's return, and nothing is being solicited. Its governing body is one person, who is also its founder and the author of this page. $0 has been raised, $0 has been spent, and no program has ever run.
Legal Status
Every filing a California charity needs, and where each one stands.
This is the complete list, in the order the filings actually happen. Every row currently says the same thing. When a row changes, this table changes on the same day, and the old value stays visible in the site's public commit history.
| Step | Filing | Agency | Published fee | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Articles of Incorporation for a nonprofit public benefit corporation (the ARTS-PB form series) | California Secretary of State | $30 | Not filed. Blocked on seating a board. |
| 02 | Bylaws and a conflict-of-interest policy, adopted at the first board meeting | Internal — not filed with anyone | $0 | Not drafted, not adopted. No meeting has been held. |
| 03 | Form SS-4 — Employer Identification Number (EIN) | Internal Revenue Service | $0 | Not filed. Requires a corporation to exist first. |
| 04 | Form SI-100 — Statement of Information, due within 90 days of incorporating and biennially after | California Secretary of State | $20 | Not filed. Nothing to report on. |
| 05 | Form CT-1 — Initial Registration with the Registry of Charities and Fundraisers | California Attorney General | $50 | Not filed. Not yet due — it is triggered by receiving assets, and none have been received. |
| 06 | Form 1023-EZ — the streamlined application for recognition of exemption as a charitable organization, submitted on Pay.gov | Internal Revenue Service | $275 | Not filed and not pending. Eligibility is decided by the Form 1023-EZ Eligibility Worksheet in the instructions; if it fails, the long-form Form 1023 applies instead, at a $600 user fee. |
| 07 | IRS determination letter | Internal Revenue Service | — | Not received. This is the single document that would change what this site is allowed to say about giving. |
| 08 | Form 3500A — Submission of Exemption Request, filed with the federal determination letter attached | California Franchise Tax Board | $0 | Not filed. Comes after step 07. |
| 09 | Annual returns thereafter — the federal Form 990 series, plus Form RRF-1 and Form 199 in California | IRS · California AG · Franchise Tax Board | — | Not applicable yet. There is no fiscal year to report. |
Money
The financial statement of an organization that has never handled a dollar.
There is no bank account, so there is no account to reconcile. Every line below is zero for the same reason: nobody has been asked for anything, and there is nowhere to put it if they had been.
| Line | Amount | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Contributions received | $0.00 | No account exists to receive them. No solicitation has been made, on this site or anywhere else. |
| Grants received | $0.00 | None applied for. Nearly every grantmaker requires a determination letter that does not exist. |
| Earned revenue | $0.00 | All four programs are designed to be free at the point of use. There is nothing to sell. |
| Filing fees paid | $0.00 | Nothing has been filed with any agency. |
| Professional fees paid | $0.00 | No attorney, accountant or consultant has been engaged. |
| Program expenses | $0.00 | No program has run. |
| Fundraising and admin expenses | $0.00 | Including this website: it is a set of static pages on the founder's existing personal hosting, at no incremental cost. |
| Cash and assets on hand | $0.00 | No bank account, no property, no equipment, no reserves. |
| Donated time | Not tracked | Founder hours only. There is no policy yet for recording or valuing volunteer time, and inventing a number for it would be the first dishonest line on this page. |
Governance
One person is not a board, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
Yusuf Gadelrab, founder
Undergraduate at San José State University, BS Computer Science, class of 2028. He wrote the program designs, he wrote this site, and there is currently nobody with the standing to overrule him on any of it. Contact is direct and unmediated: yusuf.gadelrab06@gmail.com.
Everything that makes that safe
No independent directors. No treasurer, no financial controls, no second signature, no audit, no conflict-of-interest policy, no whistleblower policy, no document-retention policy, no minutes — because there have been no meetings. California permits a nonprofit public benefit corporation to have as few as one director. That is a legal minimum, not a defensible one.
Conflicts of interest, disclosed before anyone asks
- Shield would be built on software the founder wrote. DIRA is his open-source security scanner. Using it costs the organization nothing and he takes nothing for it — but a program built on a director's own product is a related-party arrangement, and a real board would need to review it rather than take his word for it.
- EcoImpact's app is also his. Same disclosure, same reason.
- This site sits inside his personal portfolio. Miftah has no separate domain, no separate hosting and no separate identity. Work on these pages is inseparable from work on his own professional presence, and a reasonable person could read some benefit flowing back to him from that.
- Nothing has been paid to anyone, related or not. With $0 spent there is no transaction to scrutinise yet. The disclosures above exist so that the first board to sit down inherits them already written, instead of discovering them.
The fastest fix for all of this is other people. Three directors, most of them independent of the founder, is the threshold before anything gets filed — not because a form requires it, but because until then nobody is checking the person writing the checks.
The Path
Exactly what has to happen, in order, before any of this is real.
No dates are attached, because a date nobody is accountable for is a wish. The order, though, is fixed — each step is genuinely blocked by the one above it.
-
Step 01 · the actual blocker
Seat three to five directors
Most of them independent of the founder. The three most useful profiles right now: someone who has run nonprofit finances, someone from K-12 or higher education, and someone with legal training. Unpaid, roughly four meetings a year.
Everything below this line is paperwork. This is the only step that needs another human being to say yes, which is why it is first and why it is the ask on every page of this site.
Cost: $0 · Blocked on: people -
Step 02
Incorporate in California, adopt bylaws and a conflict-of-interest policy
File the nonprofit public benefit Articles of Incorporation with the Secretary of State, hold the first board meeting, adopt bylaws, adopt the conflict-of-interest policy, and record minutes. The disclosures on this page become that board's first agenda item.
Cost: about $30 · Blocked on: step 01 -
Step 03
Get the EIN, open the bank account, file the Statement of Information
Form SS-4 for the EIN, then a business account in the corporation's name with two signatories — never one — then Form SI-100 within 90 days of incorporating.
Cost: about $20 · Blocked on: step 02 -
Step 04
Register with the California Attorney General
Form CT-1 with the Registry of Charities and Fundraisers. Required before soliciting or holding charitable assets in California, and the registration has to stay current every year afterwards via Form RRF-1.
Cost: about $50 · Blocked on: step 03 -
Step 05
File the federal exemption application
Work the Form 1023-EZ Eligibility Worksheet honestly first. If it passes, Form 1023-EZ on Pay.gov at a $275 user fee. If it does not, the long-form Form 1023 at $600, which asks for narrative program descriptions and a three-year budget — most of which is already written across these pages.
Then wait. And until the letter arrives, this site keeps saying exactly what it says today.
Cost: $275 or $600 · Blocked on: step 04 -
Step 06 · before a single minor is in a room
Write and adopt the safeguarding policy
Parental consent forms, background checks for adult volunteers, a two-adult rule, a mandated-reporter acknowledgment, and a named person responsible. This gate sits in front of CodeBridge and EcoImpact regardless of what the IRS has or has not said, and it will not be quietly dropped to hit a launch date.
Cost: staff time and background-check fees · Blocked on: nothing but the writing -
Step 07 · only then
Run one program, once, small
One cohort, or one cleanup, or one audit. Measure it with the shared seven-field ledger. Publish the result here, including if it goes badly.
Cost: to be budgeted by the board that exists by then
The Commitment
This page stays up. Especially the parts that are unflattering.
Four promises about this specific page, made while it costs nothing to make them — which is the only time such promises are worth anything.
- It is never deleted, only updated. Not when the numbers get better, not when they get worse, and not when a funder would prefer a cleaner story. The same URL, the same categories, indefinitely.
- It is updated the day a line changes — not quarterly, not annually, and not in a batch timed to look good. Every version of it is in the site's public commit history, so what it said last month is checkable by anyone who cares to look.
- Failure gets the same type size as success. A cohort that does not fill, a partner that walks, an audit that finds nothing, a filing that gets rejected — those go here, in the same voice as anything that works.
- Nothing is described as deductible until a determination letter exists, and no number is published as a result until it is one. Targets are labelled targets everywhere on this site, and research findings are attributed to the research rather than borrowed by the organization.
What you should never see on this site
If any of the following ever appears on a Miftah page, it is an error and it should be reported to yusuf.gadelrab06@gmail.com, where it will be corrected rather than argued about:
- Any claim that Miftah is a registered charity, an incorporated entity, or that an exemption application is pending.
- Any suggestion that a gift to Miftah reduces anyone's taxes.
- Any reference to "our board", "our team" or "our staff" while the organization is one person.
- Any count of people served, money moved or outcomes achieved that is not traceable to a real event in the shared ledger.
- A donate button, a checkout, or any live payment path. There is none, anywhere on this site, by design.
The first row on this page changes when three people say yes.
Not money — directors. If you have run a nonprofit's books, taught in a school system, or practised law, you are the bottleneck, and one email clears it.