Four astronauts just flew around the moon for the first time in over 50 years. But here’s a detail most people don’t know about the program that got us there the first time.
NASA still has the blueprints for the Saturn V. Every schematic, every technical drawing of the F-1 engines that powered it. All archived. But when a team of young engineers disassembled old F-1 engines to study them, they found something the blueprints couldn’t tell them.
Every engine had been handcrafted. Skilled welders spent full days on single welds. Engineers solved problems on the fly and scribbled fixes on scraps of paper that were never filed. The knowledge of how to actually build the thing lived in the hands and heads of the people who made it.
By 1973, when Apollo ended, that team scattered. Retired, reassigned, moved to the private sector. Their knowledge, unwritten and irreplaceable, went with them.
The engineers studying those old engines decades later had never met the people who built them. The blueprints told them what. Nobody was left to tell them how.
That’s a story about a rocket. But it’s really a story about every organization that depends on what’s in someone’s head.
What keeps me up at night.
Level Up Cincinnati has 1.5 employees. I run virtually every operational function. Our Director of Student Success, JeRod, is part-time.
Here’s the honest question I ask myself more than I probably should: what happens if I’m no longer able to lead Level Up?
Not morbid. Practical.
Who knows how coach matching works? Who knows the financial reporting cadence? Who knows why the Salesforce fields are structured the way they are, or how the scholarship disbursement process runs, or what our grant writing system actually looks like under the hood?
The answer, right now, is mostly me.
Our board knows this. They’ve flagged it as one of our biggest organizational risks. And they’re right. We built something special at Level Up. Our scholars depend on it. Our donors trust us with their dollars. That trust has to survive any leadership transition.
This is the daily reality of a lean nonprofit. And if you’re running a small organization, I’d bet it’s yours too.
The mentor who wouldn’t let it go.
When we started Level Up, I got introduced to Tony Aloise.
Tony spent 20 years at Procter & Gamble building processes and procedures across global business units. When he retired, he turned that same discipline toward his real passion: mentorship. He now works with nonprofits across Cincinnati for free, helping them build the infrastructure to grow. The Mentor Impact award in Cincinnati carries his name.
Tony became a true mentor for me. Over multiple sessions, he pushed me to think critically about how Level Up would grow. And every single time, he brought it back to the same place.
What are your policies and procedures? How do they live on? How do you set yourself up for growth and make sure everything is documented?
Every time we’d meet, he’d re-ground me on this. And every time, my response was the same.
I agreed with the principle. I just hated the execution.
The problem with policies and procedures.
Tony was right. He was always right. Policies and procedures are the lifeblood of how an organization runs. They’re what make your best thinking repeatable and your operations transferable.
But here’s what I kept bumping up against: traditional policies and procedures become stagnant documents that sit around and nobody pays attention to.
Think about every organization you’ve ever worked at. There’s a Google Drive folder somewhere with documents that were written with good intentions. Maybe a policy manual. Maybe an employee handbook. Maybe a set of SOPs that someone spent weeks creating.
Nobody reads them. Nobody updates them. They collect dust. And when a new person comes in and needs an answer, they don’t dig through a folder. They ask someone.
Which brings you right back to the problem. The knowledge lives in someone’s head.
I believed in what Tony was preaching. I just needed a better way to execute it.
From static manual to living knowledge center.
I couldn’t solve that puzzle until recently.
We’re currently building a Knowledge Center for Level Up Cincinnati. Not a Google Drive folder full of SOPs. A living wiki where every policy, procedure, and piece of organizational knowledge is structured, searchable, linked together, and easily updated.
Don’t think of it as a document. Think of it as a brain.
Here’s how it works. I open up Claude, review which sections we’re working on that day, and then I just talk. I dictate how a process actually works. Claude asks follow-up questions about anything it doesn’t have context for. When it has a complete picture, it writes the page and automatically links it to every related section across the wiki.
It publishes live, immediately. No formatting. No layout work. No bottleneck.
The entire knowledge center will be complete in under 30 days. 53 pages covering every part of how Level Up operates. Mission and culture. Fundraising. Finance. Operations. Board governance. Partnerships. Marketing. Events. Student curriculum. Coach management. Technology. All of it.
And here’s what makes it fundamentally different from a policy manual: it’s alive. When something changes, I tell Claude what changed. The wiki is current within minutes. No version control headache. No “wait, is this the latest document?” No rewriting a 40-page manual because one process shifted.
It’s not just a reference. It’s a co-worker.
The next layer is what gets me most excited.
Someone joins Level Up tomorrow. They need to onboard a coach. Instead of sitting with me for an hour while I walk them through it, they ask an AI agent: “How do I onboard a coach?”
It pulls from the wiki, walks them through the steps, and points them to the resources they need. It’s essentially me, available at all times, without me being there.
That’s forever. That’s not just while I’m around.
Here’s a real example from yesterday. JeRod came to me and said our coaches would love a monthly email dedicated to them. Content specific to their mentoring, what’s happening with their students, things they should be thinking about.
Before, that might have felt daunting. Create the content. Draft an email. Design it. Do this every month. Hours of effort.
Here’s what it actually looks like now. I’ll build a template with Claude. Design it once through iteration until it’s right. Then each month, JeRod and I sit down, dictate what we want coaches to know, and Claude produces a finished email I drop into Mailchimp. Twenty minutes, once a month. And it’ll get better over time.
We’re calling it the Coaching Compass.
And here’s the part that ties it all together: this new process will be documented in the wiki too. When someone joins our organization, they’ll know that monthly we send the Coaching Compass, here’s the template, here’s what they look like, here’s how to produce the next one. All linked. All current.
We don’t just have a new process. We have a new process and full documentation of it. At the same time.
That’s the loop. That’s what makes the knowledge compound instead of evaporate.
The scraps of paper.
For years I carried two things that didn’t fit together. The belief that Tony was right about process and procedure. And the certainty that the way organizations actually do it is broken.
I don’t carry that tension anymore.
Those Apollo engineers scribbled their fixes on scraps of paper because documenting it properly would have slowed them down. They were building something that mattered, under pressure, with limited time.
Sound familiar?
That’s every nonprofit leader I know. You’re moving too fast to stop and write the manual. And by the time you could, half of it’s already changed.
The tools caught up. What used to take weeks of technical writing now takes a conversation. What used to become a static document nobody reads now becomes a living system that grows with your organization. What used to be the most fragile part of any organization, the knowledge in someone’s head, can now be the most durable.
The barrier isn’t time. The barrier isn’t cost. The barrier is deciding to start.
NASA lost fifty years because no one captured what the engineers knew. Your organization doesn’t have to lose a single day.
The toolbox.
Here’s what we used to build the Knowledge Center:
Claude Code: AI partner for writing wiki content, creating links, and structuring pages
MkDocs + Material theme: wiki framework
GitHub: version control and content storage
Vercel: hosting with automatic deploys on every push
Wispr Flow: voice-to-text for dictating processes
Obsidian: organizational knowledge base that feeds the wiki
Less than $125 in monthly cost.
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This is the fifth post in The $0 Department: What Happens When a Nonprofit Stops Hiring and Starts Building. Subscribe to follow the full series.
Level Up Cincinnati empowers first-generation college students through mentorship, scholarships, and professional development. 100% of donations go directly to student programming. Learn more at https://levelupcincinnati.org