About the Technology Monastery
A project of Free For Charity: free technology for small nonprofits today, and a campus where the people who deliver it can live, learn and serve.
Our mission
Small nonprofits should not have to choose between their mission and their technology. The Technology Monastery removes that choice by running the systems a charity needs, email, domains, websites, AI tools and training, at no cost, through people who have chosen to give their skills away.
We are part of Free For Charity, a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 46-2471893) whose purpose is to reduce costs and increase revenues for other nonprofits so that more money reaches their charitable work.
How it works today
A charity applies, we talk through what they have and what they need, and then we do the work: a free .org domain, nonprofit email and collaboration on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, a fast static website with the legal and privacy pages a professional site requires, help deciding where AI fits, and training for the people who will use it all. Everything is documented so it keeps working after we step back.
The program is delivered by volunteers today. That is the strength of the model and its limit: volunteers are generous, and their time is short.
The monastery idea
A monastery is a place where people live simply, keep a rhythm of work, study and rest, and give their effort to something larger than themselves. We borrow that shape, not a creed. The Technology Monastery is non-sectarian and open to anyone: no religious test, every faith and none welcome, and a short set of community agreements in place of a rule.
The people we expect to welcome first are those who already know what it means to start again and want to give back: veterans, survivors leaving women's shelters, people in recovery who have stabilized, technologists who build open-source and other public-good software, and university students on capstone projects. Each arrives, finds their footing, learns the stack, serves real charities, and leaves stronger, or stays on as a mentor or staff member.
Where we have been
Free For Charity has run a campus-style program before, in Arizona, and learned what it takes to host people and work in one place. The Technology Monastery began as the digital successor to that effort: a service program that could run anywhere, without a building. The Pennsylvania campus revives the campus capability on land we intend to own, in a setting suited to focused work and to recovery.
Why staff matter
The grant we are seeking funds two full-time staff, hired in sequence over the first two years: a Volunteer Manager, who recruits, places and supports residents and remote volunteers and opens the pipelines that need a full-time host, and a Program Coordinator, who runs intake, service delivery to charities, partner relationships and reporting.
Our five-year goal is to have both positions fully funded at reasonable compensation, with their endowment under way and on a published path for the work, based at the campus. That is the point of the project: stability for the whole Free For Charity mission, so that it no longer depends on unpaid leadership.
Read the campus planPartners and governance
TechnoMonasteries is a volunteer project helping us create the Technology Monastery. It operates under Free For Charity's Technology Monastery brand for the United States campus and hopes, over the next decade or more, to develop a similar place abroad focused on the open-source community. It is not a separate charity, and gifts to the campus are made through Free For Charity.
The Technology Monastery is governed by Free For Charity's board of directors, and its finances, policies and transparency profile are Free For Charity's. The board, the latest filings and the Candid (GuideStar) profile are published on freeforcharity.org.
To be clear about where we stand today: Free For Charity is a 100 percent volunteer organization, and the Technology Monastery is a proposed project; if it is funded, its two staff roles would be the only paid positions at Free For Charity. The Technology Monastery is not a separate legal entity. It has no EIN of its own, and every gift, grant, contract and filing runs through Free For Charity, EIN 46-2471893. Our goal is to become a stand-alone charity, with its own IRS 501(c)(3) determination and state registrations, as the program matures. We will say so here when that changes.
Join us
Whether you run a nonprofit that needs technology, want to serve, or represent a partner or funder, we would like to hear from you.