Uncaged Library Information Services is a consultancy founded by Anand Jay Kalra in 2016. I earned a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Michigan in 2010; I had pursued the degree on the hunch that there was something about this “information stuff” that could transfer to social justice and nonprofit work to help us work more efficiently and humanely, and therefore compete better against more well-funded right-wing groups. It turns out that the organic librarians of an organization are its operations staff, and the work I sought to do shows up most naturally in operations and finance, and to a moderate degree in communications and fundraising.
I incorporate lessons from sub-fields such as information organization and retrieval, information seeking behavior, information literacy, bibliographic and technological instruction, community informatics, and combinatorics in my current work. Since launching my consulting practice, I have helped more than thirty social justice organizations ground their systems, practices, and processes in principles of transparency, justice, and shared power in service of collective liberation.
I am now taking consult appointments with potential new clients for contracts beginning August 2026. I’m particularly interested in supporting organizations that are sunsetting, or would like to get organized in case they do need to shut down in the next 1-3 years. More about organizational endings work.
For detail on my work and education history, please see my profile on LinkedIn.
Services
Finance Management & Bookkeeping
I bring more than a decade of experience in nonprofit financial management, including progressive growth in staff roles from finance & operations manager to executive director at a $1.4 million 501c3 organization. I have specialized expertise with fiscal sponsorship accounting.
Clients describe me as “encouraging, committed, and kind” and having an “incredibly organized mind and workflow”. I’ve worked with nonprofit organizations distributed across the country, with budgets ranging from less than $50k to $4 million, and servicing a wide variety of diverse communities.
What I can do for you:
- Keep GAAP- and FASB-compliant financial records in QuickBooks or Xero
- Reconcile bank and other asset accounts
- Produce standard financial reports (balance sheet, profit & loss, cash flow)
- New organization setup, or retrofitting existing organization’s QBO configuration
- Prepare monthly Temporarily Restricted Net Assets (TRNA) schedule
- File vendor 1099s annually
Information Systems, Structures, & Processes
My work surfaces the invisible conduits of information in an organization, identifies breakdowns in internal communication channels, facilitates knowledge development about the power inherent in an organization’s information ecosystem, and proposes practical solutions that are both technically and relationally sound.
Overall, the approach is about bringing organizations into internal alignment and improving the efficiency with which they map their values into practice, which in turn decreases conflict and increases spaciousness around the work. Specific projects have included conflict mediation, file management (architecture, reorganization, access & permissions), digital security, CRM database assessments and data model design, mail server migration, coaching operations staff, designing and hiring in an operations department, and tailored training in everyday language about all of the above and more. Here is a presentation I gave recently about information in social justice organizations with a focus on contact records management (CRM) databases. But my FAVORITE presentation to teach is “Information Flows, Collections, & Networks in Community-Led Organizations” – it synthesizes the theory, concepts, and practices that are throughlines in all my work.
Contact
Anand Jay Kalra
anand[at]uncagedlibrarian[dot]org
(seven three four)845-2577