Keep the records public. Keep the work going.
Valor Investigations is a one-person shop doing the work of a newsroom. Every dollar goes straight to public-records fees, filing costs, travel to hearings, and the infrastructure that keeps the corpus and the lookup engine live.
Donate via Donorbox
Secure checkout. One-time or recurring. You'll get a Donorbox confirmation immediately and an IRS-compliant receipt from us below.
DonateWhere your donation goes
Public records & filing fees
State, county, and federal records requests. FOIA copy fees, certified court documents, OGEC filings, court filing fees, service fees, transcript orders, mandamus petitions, appellate briefs.
Website & hosting
Domain, Vercel hosting, Resend email delivery, database storage, SSL, monitoring. Keeps the public lookup engine, tip line, and receipt system online for free public use.
Data scraping & OSINT tools
Apify actors, Firecrawl, Bright Data residential proxies, OpenCorporates, CourtListener, ProPublica access. The harvest layer that pulls public records, 990s, and court filings into the corpus.
AI engine & API credits
Grok, Claude, and OpenAI API credits that power the public lookup engine's answers plus the citation-audit pass that strips unsupported claims before a reader sees them.
Smart Filings / Advocate Toolkit
Infrastructure behind the self-advocate filing tools -- template generation, citation checks, format validation against Oregon court rules. Keeps legal help free for people fighting abusive guardianships without a lawyer.
HIPAA-compliant storage
Ongoing cost of HIPAA-compliant cloud RAG databases required to hold sensitive medical and guardianship records. A donation-funded local deployment would eliminate this recurring bill -- see the equipment goal below.
Equipment goal: local infrastructure + agentic communications
Right now this is a one-person shop. People reach out with tips, questions, and their own stories and I can't always get back to them because there are only so many hours in a day and I can't afford office staff. Targeted equipment donations would fund a local agentic workflow that handles intake, responses, and document routing without a monthly cloud bill.
A localized setup would also let us retire the HIPAA-compliant cloud RAG database in favor of an on-prem system -- same compliance posture, one-time hardware cost instead of a recurring subscription. Contact info@valorinvestigates.com if you want to earmark a donation for this line specifically.
Get your tax receipt
PayPal's automatic email is a payment confirmation, not an IRS-compliant donation receipt. Fill this out and we'll email you a proper receipt with our EIN and the required tax-deductibility language.
Tax-deductibility: Valor Investigates (the registered nonprofit entity behind this journalism operation) is a certified 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charity recognized by the Internal Revenue Service under EIN 41-4718382. Contributions are tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowed by law.
No goods or services are provided in exchange for contributions. Every receipt we send includes our EIN, the donation amount and date, and the required IRS Publication 1771 language. Please consult your tax advisor for your specific circumstances.
Other ways to help
Send a tip
If you saw something, know someone, or have records: use the tip form on the Intelligence page.
Go to the tip form →Request a public record
If the Union County lookup engine doesn't have what you need, tell us what's missing. We'll track it down and add it.
Submit a records request →Share the work
The corpus is public on GitHub. Cite it, fork it, contribute corrections via issues and pull requests.
View the corpus on GitHub →Mail a check
Prefer checks? Make payable to Valor Investigates (the registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit). Email us first at info@valorinvestigates.com for the mailing address and we'll send a receipt once the check arrives.
Questions? info@valorinvestigates.com
Valor Investigates · Oregon nonprofit corporation · EIN 41-4718382 · Certified 501(c)(3)