About Pre
Save the Past. Serve the Future.
Pre is a nonprofit initiative that digitizes endangered physical records in countries and communities where public services remain entirely paper-based.
Who We Are
Origin Story
Pre began with a family. Pace and Matt Ellsworth traveled to Burundi to trace their family history and encountered something they did not expect: an entire country’s civil records — birth certificates, marriage registrations, death records — stored only on paper, in buildings vulnerable to fire, flood, and simple neglect.
What started as a genealogy project became an infrastructure project. The Ellsworths realized that the same systems they used to trace their own ancestry could be adapted to serve communities where no digital records existed at all. Not as a service delivered from outside, but as capacity built from within.
Pre Foundation was established as a Missouri 501(c)(3) nonprofit to carry this mission forward. PRE BI LLC, its wholly-owned subsidiary, handles contracted digitization services and technology development — modeled after the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox relationship. Both entities serve the same goal: build the infrastructure of memory.
Our Mission
Why We Exist
Pre digitizes endangered records — civil registries, medical records, legal documents, newspapers, employment histories — in countries and communities where public services remain entirely paper-based. By converting analog archives into accessible digital infrastructure, Pre removes friction from society: people gain the ability to prove identity, assert legal rights, access medical histories, obtain visas, and participate fully in modern civic and economic life.
Our Structure
Foundation + LLC
Pre Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. It handles impact work, partnerships, grants, and community engagement. PRE BI LLC is its wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary, responsible for contracted digitization services, technology development, and revenue-generating operations.
This structure is modeled after the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox relationship. The nonprofit sets the mission and ensures accountability. The LLC generates sustainable revenue and builds tools. Both serve the same goal.
Our Team
The People Behind Pre
Pace Ellsworth
Director / CTO
Technical architecture, strategy, and operations across Pre Foundation and PRE BI LLC. Leads platform development and organizational vision.
Matt Ellsworth
Co-Founder / Field Operations
On-ground scanning operations. RootsTech presence. Community organizing and the first field trips that launched the initiative.
Vianney Ntungirimana
Burundi Field Lead
Local operations in Bujumbura. African government partnership liaison. The critical link between Pre's methodology and local institutions.
Jaycee
Strategic Advisor / Branding
Brand strategy and organizational narrative. Ensuring Pre's story reaches the audiences that can accelerate the mission.
Our Values
What We Stand For
Preservation as Infrastructure
We do not treat record preservation as nostalgia. It is foundational infrastructure — as essential as roads, courts, or hospitals. Without records, none of those systems work.
Local Ownership
Every archive we build belongs to the community it serves. We partner, train, and hand over. We do not extract.
Radical Accessibility
If people cannot access their records, digitization has failed. Every system we build prioritizes reach over perfection.
Disciplined Scale
We prove the model in one place before moving to the next. Growth is earned, not assumed.
Transparency
Our methods, costs, and outcomes are public. Trust is built through openness.
Our Thesis
The Right to Be Remembered
The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation enshrines a “right to be forgotten” — the right to have your personal data erased from digital systems. It is a landmark of digital rights. But there is no corresponding protection for the opposite: the right to be remembered.
This asymmetry has consequences. In practice, it means that anyone — a government, a natural disaster, simple institutional neglect — can erase a culture by allowing its records to deteriorate. There is no legal framework that says: these records must be preserved. These people have a right to have their existence documented and accessible.
Consider what happens when records are lost. A person born in a rural district whose birth certificate exists only on paper in a municipal office. If that building floods, that person may lose the ability to prove their age, their citizenship, their parentage. They cannot obtain a passport. They cannot enroll in school. They cannot inherit property. They cannot vote.
Now multiply that by millions. In dozens of countries, entire populations live without digital records infrastructure. Their civic identity exists in the most fragile possible form: ink on paper, in buildings with no climate control, no fire suppression, no backup.
Pre exists to close that gap. We believe that preservation is not a luxury — it is infrastructure. Just as a society needs roads, courts, and hospitals, it needs records. And just as we have come to recognize that access to the internet is a right, we argue that access to your own documented existence is a right.
We are building toward a world where “the right to be remembered” is as well-established as the right to be forgotten. Where no government can allow its archives to crumble without accountability. Where every person, regardless of where they were born, can access the records that prove who they are.
This is not about the past. This is about freedom.