The first year, Open Door Legal had a budget of $35,000 so Tirtanadi did everything from coding their database, cleaning the toilet, and managing volunteers to fundraising, going to trial, and building an operational system. You can’t drive revenue, you’re always undercapitalized, and you can’t attract talent so you end up doing a lot of it yourself.” “It was ten times harder than I thought it would be.

“I would not recommend starting a nonprofit to anyone,” Tirtanadi jokes. Just two weeks after graduating from law school, Tirtanadi started Open Door Legal with his law school classmate in San Francisco. “I wanted to create a nonprofit that could pioneer universal access to legal help.”

Tirtanadi believed that legal aid was a critical factor in protecting vulnerable populations from being deprived of rights like fair housing and equal pay. From then on, he realized his life mission was to help alleviate poverty however he could.Īfter studying political economy, sociology, and income inequality for his undergraduate degree and working for three years in community development, he came up with a thesis that increasing access to legal services would be the most effective way to reduce poverty in America. In doing so, he became aware of just how wide the income divide was around the world and it felt unfair. He’d picked up one of his parents’ World Book encyclopedias and started memorizing different countries’ income tables from it. Adrian Tirtanadi was in middle school when he discovered income inequality was a serious issue.

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