Transparency takes time. A lot of time.

Something that began to sink in a week after publishing our finances, is that transparency takes a lot of time and effort both leading up to and after publication. For example: I went through a zillion drafts, outlined a structure for the report and the data, exported the data, cleaned it up, generated graphs, refined the graphs visually in Illustrator. And that was all before publishing! After publishing, there was the process of reaching out to people, tracking their responses, engaging in debates, considering ways to be sensitive to peoples’ needs, revising the document, and writing new protocol going forward on transparency. In fact, the report took me so long to put together that I eventually stopped tracking my hours and ended up not billing the school for the whole writing process. If I had done so at $25 an hour, the report so might have cost thousands of dollars. To me, the opportunity to do this kind of experiment and learn from it has been worth it, in and of itself. The teachers, students, and friends of the school are people who already think about these issues a lot. So provoking them into debate, getting to engage with them, and working on a small but real project on financial transparency has truly been a privilege.