Stand Up Valor.
We are standing up an independent newsroom in a place with no advocacy left: a first office, the machine and tools to run it, and our flagship project -- a map of every guardianship and probate case in Oregon -- running statewide. By New Year's.
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Goal: $85,000 by December 31, 2026.
The campaign opens today. Totals are updated by hand from Donorbox, not streamed live.
The flagship: Map Oregon
When an Oregon court appoints a guardian or a conservator over an adult, it hands one person control of another person's money, medicine, and movement. The orders are public. The pattern they form is not -- no one publishes a usable picture of who these people are, who was appointed over them, or what happened next.
We are building that picture out of the court records themselves, county by county, case by case. It is slow, it is unglamorous, and it is almost entirely a question of records fees. The map is already running. What it needs now is the funding to reach every county in the state.
78.5% of protected persons in Oregon adult protective proceedings have no lawyer.
Where the money goes
Standing up the newsroom and running the map statewide -- exact figures, real costs.
Court records and copy fees
$6,000OJCIN docket access and certified copies. Court records are what this work actually pays for today.
Court filings and transportation
$8,000Filing costs, service, and the miles to courthouses as we fight records denials in court.
A machine for local AI
$20,000One server with enough memory to run frontier-scale open models in-house, so families' case files never leave the building.
Laptops, networking, and tools paid yearly
$20,000Laptops, secure networking, machine learning tools, and the software we depend on -- paid annually instead of struggling month to month.
Outside help
$7,600Sourcing out some of the labor so one reporter is not the whole pipeline.
A first office and the basics
$8,400$450 a month for a real door and a table where families can sit down, plus a business phone, a P.O. Box, and service for the office printer.
Fighting for families like Russell and Patty's
$15,000The casework, and the free self-help tools families use to stand up for themselves -- built, maintained, and free.
How we know these numbers
The court-records lines come from real invoices: published OJCIN rates and actual Oregon Judicial Department estimates. The hardware and operating lines are what standing this newsroom up actually costs. Rounded so the seven lines total exactly the goal. When an agency demands an unlawful fee, we do not pay it -- we fight it, and the filing costs live on this list instead.
Out here there is no advocacy left and no local journalism left. What we are standing up is real, and we are proving it can be done.
Valor Investigates is a certified 501(c)(3). Contributions are tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowed by law.
$85,000 stands up Valor
One-time or monthly. Secure checkout through Donorbox, with an IRS-compliant receipt available from us directly.
Prefer a receipt with the IRS Publication 1771 language? Request one on the donate page.
Follow the stand-up
Every completed county and every win is a story. Get them as they publish.
Who is doing this
Valor Investigates is an Oregon nonprofit corporation and a certified 501(c)(3), founded by Levi Bakke -- a Marine Corps veteran and investigative journalist in La Grande. The reporting is evidence-first: public records, court filings, and documents that can be checked by anyone who wants to check them.
The organization is governed by a five-member board of victims and advocates, young and old. Among them: a child advocate who spends part of every year in Costa Rica working with survivors of child trafficking, and the rest of the year doing the same work at home; a physician associate; an elder who lived through the systems we investigate; and the secretary who keeps the paperwork standing.