The sector doing the most good deserves infrastructure built for it.
For Purpose OS is a growing set of tools for the people running mission-driven organizations. It exists because its founder needed it, could not find it, and eventually stopped waiting.
It started with a flyer in a lunchbox.
May L. Harris was already a practicing attorney, in a different area of law, when a flyer came home in her son's lunchbox. An innovative charter school was looking for a parent who was also a lawyer, to volunteer and help start a nonprofit foundation supporting its fundraising. She was the only one who responded.
"I'm a lawyer," she figured. "How hard can it be?" Harder than she expected, and far more important than she realized. Law school had not taught her nonprofit law, so she did what most founders do: relied on templates, researched a great deal, and made it work. The organization launched and went on to raise significant funds, including a $1.7 million multi-year federal grant for a consortium of charter schools in San Diego.
She could see the gaps almost immediately.
Then she took the chair.
As the organization grew, May stepped into the Executive Director role and started asking the question every leader in that seat eventually asks: what do I not know yet, and how do I learn it before it hurts us. That question sent her back to the University of San Diego for a Master's in Nonprofit Leadership and Management, earned while running the very nonprofit she had helped form.
In those classrooms, surrounded by other Executive Directors and founders, she heard the same things over and over. We did not know we had to register to fundraise in other states. Our board is great, but no one understands governance. We assumed having a lawyer on the board meant we had legal counsel.
Compliance is not the ceiling. It is the floor. Once you understand the legal and structural framework of your organization, you are free to lead boldly.
May L. Harris, Esq., MAMost of those organizations were doing the best they could with what they had. They were not protected, and they were not set up to scale. In 2012 May founded For Purpose Law Group to serve nonprofits the way they operate in real life rather than in textbook theory. She has since been selected to the San Diego Super Lawyers list in 2024, 2025, and 2026, and has worked with hundreds of nonprofit founders, board members, and executives.
Why For Purpose OS exists
A law firm can only reach so many organizations, and legal counsel is only part of what a leader in that chair needs. The rest is knowledge, judgment, and people who understand the work without needing it explained.
For Purpose OS is the answer to that. ēosIQ puts sector-specific guidance in the hands of leaders who could never justify a phone call for every question. Akademia gives them the education and the peers the sector never organized for them. They are sold separately because they solve different problems, and a leader should be able to buy the one they need today.
More tools are coming. The direction is the same: nonprofit leaders should not have to assemble their own support system out of a dozen disconnected parts.
What we will not do
ēosIQ provides guidance, not legal advice, and it will tell you when a matter needs an attorney. We do not claim to replace your lawyer, your accountant, or your judgment. We augment human expertise rather than substituting for it, and we do not promise outcomes we cannot control.
For Purpose OS is operated by Nonprofit Counsel, Inc., a Delaware public benefit corporation. It is a for-profit company, not a nonprofit. For Purpose Law Group and For Purpose Accounting are independent firms that share a founder with us.
Taught by people who have done the work.
Every Akademia course is built by a practitioner in that discipline, not by a content team studying it from the outside.
You do not have to figure this out alone.
That is the entire premise. Start with whichever product answers the question in front of you.