AI for Non Profits Network: Weekly Briefing 03/31
The weekly digest from a network of non-profits: What we learnt from our first meeting of Open AI grant recipients; One simple thing that could change things for your org; Last access to our workshop.
In The Briefing this week:
š What's Caught our Eye: Inside the Room: What OpenAIās Grant Recipients Are Actually Building
š Thought for the Week: The Simplest AI Policy Iāve Heard All Year
ā Interesting News and Funding Calls
š From Across the Network
This newsletter is supported by Whitelabel.ai - helping nonprofits cut through the AI noise with practical tools built for mission-driven teams. Find out more at whitelabel.ai
1) š What Caught Our Eye: Inside the Room: What OpenAIās Grant Recipients Are Actually Building
Last week, we helped to convene the first session of a new peer learning network - bringing together nonprofits from OpenAIās People-First AI Fund, which distributed $40.5 million in unrestricted grants to 208 organizations across the US. We first reported on it back in December.
Fourteen organizations joined the inaugural call, representing a striking cross-section of the sector: LGBTQ+ youth services, veteransā transition support, public health advocacy, and postpartum care.
Four projects presented early progress and ambitions. Project Equity is using machine learning to identify small businesses ripe for employee ownership transition - an AI early-warning system to catch companies before they close or get absorbed by private equity. It Gets Better is building an AI layer across their imi guide for LGBTQ+ youth. Social Creatures is developing a HIPAA-compliant postpartum companion app. And The Forbes Funds is building a network of AI agents - one per nonprofit - that can hand off a community member mid-conversation to a better-matched organization.
The groupās most candid moments came around shared anxieties: hallucination risk in vulnerable-population contexts, data privacy, and community trust. As the group work through these concerns, weāll be sharing lessons to the rest of the network for wider knowledge dissemination.
For the rest of the network: Weāll be following these projects over the next nine months and report back. Weāre also supporting applications for a new funding call on AI for Charitable Giving - get in touch with us if youāre interested!
Last Chance to Join Our Workshop Tomorrow: Leading on AI When You Feel Behind with Paul Butcher - Join Us 1st April
If youāve spent the last six months nodding along in AI conversations while quietly wondering whether everyone else understands this better than you do this is the session is for you.
Our free 90-minute working session is designed specifically for nonprofit leaders who need to make smart decisions about AI without understanding every detail of how it works. Feeling ābehindā isnāt a sign of limited capability. Itās a rational response to an irrational pace of change.
Joining us is Paul Butcher, from CommonSensing AI and former CMO and Digital Lead at Save the Children. Youāll walk away with a simple framework for AI decisions, a draft governance position for your board, and clarity on where to start - and what to stop worrying about.
Wednesday April 1 | 2pm EST | 90 minutes | Free
Reserve your spot by replying to this email or writing to us at hello@aifornonprofitsnetwork.org.
2) š Thought for the Week: The Simplest AI Policy Iāve Heard All Year
I had a conversation this week that Iāve been thinking about a lot.
I was talking with the executive director of a mid-sized nonprofit - the kind of leader who is thoughtful, pragmatic, and refreshingly unbothered by the need to sound like he has all the answers. We were discussing AI adoption, and I asked him what his organizationās policy was. I expected the usual: a working group, a draft framework, a consultant brought in, a board conversation scheduled for Q3.
Instead, he smiled and said: āI knew everyone was already using it. So I just tried one thing.ā
That one thing was this: any report or memo sent internally must include, on the first page, the name of the LLM used and the exact prompt that was inputted. Thatās it. No ban. No lengthy acceptable use policy. No declaration form. Just: show your working.
Iāve been thinking about it ever since, because the more I turn it over, the more elegant it seems.
First, itās honest about reality. The 2026 Nonprofit AI Adoption Report (and all of our recent workshops) found that 92% of nonprofits are already using AI in some capacity the vast majority informally and individually. Pretending otherwise, or asking staff to declare usage through some formal process, creates a compliance theater that nobody believes in. This leader skipped that theater entirely. He started from the assumption that AI was already in the room, and asked only that people stop pretending it wasnāt.
Second, it creates transparency without shame. Thereās a real cultural risk in how organizations handle AI disclosure. If the message - explicit or implied - is that AI use is something to be monitored or managed, staff will hide it. The prompt-on-the-first-page approach does the opposite. It normalizes AI as a tool like any other, while making its use visible. Nobody is being caught out. Everyone is just showing how they got from A to B.
Third, it turns every memo into a learning opportunity. When a colleague sends a report and the first page shows they used Claude with a specific prompt, and the output is excellent, you now know something useful. When the output is mediocre, you know something useful about that too. Over time, an organization starts to develop a shared, practical understanding of what good prompting looks like in their specific context. Not in the abstract. Not from a webinar. From their own work, in their own words, on their own issues.
This is what AI literacy actually looks like when itās embedded into practice rather than bolted on as a training day. It doesnāt require a budget line. It doesnāt require a Chief AI Officer. It requires one instruction and a culture of curiosity.
There are legitimate questions to sit with, of course. What happens when someone submits a prompt that reveals theyāve been putting sensitive client data into a public LLM? What if the prompt discloses a gap in someoneās skills that theyāre embarrassed about? These arenāt reasons to abandon the approach - theyāre reasons to pair it with psychological safety, and to be clear that the goal is learning, not surveillance. The executive director I spoke with was explicit about this with his team: this is not about catching anyone out. Itās about getting better together.
Heās planning to review the prompts collectively in team meetings - not to grade them, but to crowdsource improvements. Someone will have found a framing that works brilliantly for grant reporting. Someone else will have cracked the right prompt for board briefings. That institutional knowledge, right now, lives in individual browser histories. This simple policy starts to surface it.
For nonprofit leaders, the lesson isnāt specifically about prompts on memos. Itās about the disposition behind the idea: lead from reality, not from aspiration. Your staff are using AI. The question isnāt whether to permit it - that ship has sailed. The question is whether you can create the conditions for your organization to learn from it collectively, rather than letting it remain a hundred isolated experiments happening in parallel, invisibly, with no shared benefit.
One page. One LLM. One prompt. Itās a small thing. But small things, applied consistently, have a habit of changing culture in ways that big policies never quite manage.
3) ā Interesting News and Funding Calls
Weāre supporting applications to the Gates Fund on AI for Charitable Giving - Learn more Here.
AI came into the nonprofit workplace through the side door (Alliance Magazine)
A practical guide to responsible AI for the social impact sector (IBM)
Young Futures: $1.4 Million Awarded To Nonprofits Supporting Youth Navigation Of AI (Pulse 2.0)
4) š From Across the Network
Have an event, case study, gathering or interesting insight you would like to share with the network? Drop us a note by replying to this email.
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