FiscalNote’s Legacy of Impact Through Service
By: Gerald Yao
Tags: Csr, Kindness, Impact, Fiscalnote, Volunteering

Volunteering during Wendy’s Day 2019 (I’m in the gray hat).

August is Impact Month for FiscalNote, in which we focus on performing acts of service and kindness. The main event is our annual day of service, Wendy’s Day (Thursday, August 19, 2021), named in honor and memory of our former Chief of Staff Wendy K. Martinez. Last year, we made adjustments that have allowed us to keep this tradition alive amid an ongoing global pandemic. You can read more about it here, and you’re invited to participate alongside us on Thursday, too.

Wendy’s Day 2021 will be observed on Thursday, August 19.

In celebration of Impact Month, and as a FiscalNote co-founder, I wanted to share both my personal origins in volunteerism as well as FiscalNote’s legacy of service.

My Origins in Volunteerism

I started volunteering in middle school, spending my summers as a counselor-in-training at various camps. Then, as a teacher’s aide at an elementary school, and a youth staff member at the Dupont Circle YMCA in Washington D.C. (the latter of which closed in 2015). I loved and cherished these experiences as they taught me a lot about myself, working with teams, and — most importantly — how to wrangle large groups of children. All of these learnings have served me well and will continue to do so.

However, the largest volunteer effort of my life began when my FiscalNote co-founder Tim Hwang created Operation Fly, Inc., a student-run 501(c)(3) dedicated to helping people experiencing homelessness in cities across the United States. I was a founding member, from attending the first meeting to spending hundreds of hours building the organization and its initiatives right up until my high-school graduation. Building an organization from scratch with the goal of helping others was incredibly self-motivating, and the Operation Fly experience helped me both discover and build upon that. Operation Fly’s core value was altruism, which still resonates with me 14 years later. After all — and to this day — my career is still focused on mission-driven entrepreneurship. Enter: FiscalNote and its legacy of service.

FiscalNote’s Legacy of Service

How service has been weaved through our mission, values, and actions

Having launched our careers in non-profit, when Tim and I founded FiscalNote alongside our third co-founder, Jonathan Chen, we thought deeply about the positive social impact we could make in providing greater access to government information. Every country has a government, and these governments have an enormous impact on their citizens, from roads to public health policies. The federal government in the United States had a budget of nearly $3 trillion (yes trillion, not billion) when we established FiscalNote in 2013, greater than even the market capitalization of any company in the world.

FiscalNote’s original mission was to leverage technology and design to make government more accessible, transparent, and accountable (the mission statement was eventually shortened to the pithier, “Connecting the world to their governments,” carrying the same ethos). We fundamentally believed that the advances in technology were not being leveraged enough around government information, especially as local news sources declined. Our goal was to create a sustainable business model with technology that could improve upon the past methods of covering government, with the mindset that we would continuously reinvest earnings to create more valuable offerings.

Since 2013, FiscalNote has expanded into providing data, workflow, and intelligence related to the global regulatory and policy ecosystem. We cover geopolitical risk, provide grassroots advocacy tools, constituent management software, and on the whole help organizations tackle their most important issues with our solutions. And we’ve done this by keeping relentless focus and long-term thinking on our mission.

Thus far, the topic has surrounded FiscalNote’s mission-orientedness, which is a component of how we think about contributing positively to society. However, beyond our team's core mission, there are meaningful efforts in different categories that compose our identity. Corporate social responsibility efforts at FiscalNote are bucketed into three categories:

Mission-driven causes — specific to the FiscalNote mission (e.g. Government transparency and accountability)

— specific to the FiscalNote mission (e.g. Government transparency and accountability) Specialty-driven causes — related to FiscalNote’s core capabilities, like technology (e.g. STEM education)

— related to FiscalNote’s core capabilities, like technology (e.g. STEM education) General causes— what is good for society that doesn’t tie in with our mission or unique capabilities (e.g. Volunteering at a food bank, cleaning a local river)

In the specialty-driven category, FiscalNoters have volunteered at technology-related events over the years. We’ve hosted Women Who Code since our inception, had employees volunteer at Techstravaganza, sponsored Girls in Technology, and helped kick off the DC chapter of Latinas in Tech. The latter two of which FiscalNote has partnered with the Wendy Martinez Legacy Project (WMLP), created in honor of Wendy Martinez. WLMP’s focus is the advancement and support of women and girls in technology, women’s entrepreneurship, and community engagement.

With regard to general causes, we’ve covered a wider range of activities with organizations within our communities across our office locations, and we have volunteered with many of them during Wendy’s Days of the past. Over the years, we’ve been involved with organizations in our local communities across the Washington D.C. Area, New York City, and Baton Rouge in the United States, as well as Gurgaon, India. The organizations we work with are listed below if you’d like to learn more.

DC-based FiscalNoters volunteering at a local food bank in 2019.

Washington, D.C. (Metro Area)

New York

Baton Rouge

Gurgaon

FiscalNoters volunteering with Frendicoes — an animal shelter — in the Gurgaon region of India in 2019.

FiscalNote also partners with the Wendy Martinez Legacy Project (WMLP) to support the following organizations in the Washington D.C. area:

Looking back at this journey, I’m proud of the efforts global FiscalNoters have made — across each aforementioned category — to both uphold and prioritize corporate social responsibility. While there remains much room for growth, I’m looking forward to continuing this work together to drive a stronger, more positive impact in the world.