🗞️ AI for Non Profits Network: Weekly Briefing 01/06

The weekly digest from a network of non-profits interested in AI. What's in this week's Briefing: Notre Dame’s $50M Bet on Faith-Based AI Ethics; What does 2026 have in store for non-profits and AI.

In The Briefing this week:

1. 👀 What’s Caught our Eye: Notre Dame’s $50M Bet on Faith-Based AI Ethics

2. 💭 Thought for the Week: The year ahead; what to look out for in 2026

3. 🌟 Interesting News

4. 🌐 From Across the Network

There’s still a few places left for our first Free AI for Non-Profits Network workshop on 28th January at 2pm (EST). We’ll discuss 2026 goals and how to implement safe and structured pilots in key areas of your organization across an informal and open peer learning process.

Reply to this email or send us a message if you are interested in joining.

1) 👀 What Caught Our Eye: Notre Dame’s $50M Bet on Faith-Based AI Ethics

The University of Notre Dame just received the largest private foundation grant in its history - $50.8 million from the Lilly Endowment - to build the DELTA Network, a faith-based ethical framework for AI. DELTA stands for Dignity, Embodiment, Love, Transcendence, and Agency.

Notre Dame plans to establish DELTA hubs in Silicon Valley and the Northeast specifically to connect tech leaders with faith communities, religious educators, and the broader public. They’re building what they call “communities of practice” focused on education, pastoral ministry, and public engagement - with the explicit goal of shaping how AI is developed and used, not just studying it from the sidelines.

Why this matters beyond theology:

Whether you’re faith-based or secular, Notre Dame is doing something most nonprofits aren’t: investing in the infrastructure to translate values into actionable guidance. While tech companies race ahead and most organizations scramble to catch up, they’ve spent a year conducting 200+ stakeholder conversations to map the landscape before building solutions.

That’s the pattern we keep seeing work: audit before action, framework before tools, values before vendors.

But we’re also seeing a tension play out; Notre Dame is positioning this framework as “accessible to people of all faith perspectives” - essentially trying to build universal ethical guidance from Christian theological principles. That’s ambitious. The real test will be whether secular nonprofits, non-Christian faith communities, and diverse stakeholders actually find it useful, or whether it becomes another well-funded framework that speaks primarily to its own constituency.

The lesson for nonprofit leaders:

You don’t need $50 million to do what Notre Dame is doing at scale. But you do need their discipline: map the landscape, engage stakeholders, articulate your values explicitly, then build practical resources that help people navigate real decisions.

Most nonprofits are doing the opposite - adopting tools first, then retrofitting ethics later. Notre Dame’s approach reverses that. Whether their specific framework resonates beyond Christian institutions remains to be seen, but the methodology is worth stealing.

Two Quick Questions:

Does AI ethics actually need a faith-based foundation - or does grounding it in religious principles risk excluding the very communities who most need clear guidance?

And the reverse: As AI raises profound questions about human dignity, agency, and what it means to be human, does that make faith traditions more relevant to technology conversations, not less?

I’m genuinely curious where you land on this. Comment and tell us: Should nonprofits look to faith-based frameworks for AI ethics, or build something else entirely?

2) 💭 Thought of the Week: Why 2026 is the Year Non-Profits Get Real Benefit from AI

It is 2026; the breathless hype cycle regarding generative AI has, thankfully, begun to settle. We have moved past the initial shock of the “magic trick” and arrived at the messy, necessary work of integration. For the non-profit sector, our hope for this year is simple: we must stop treating AI adoption as an IT project and start treating it as a transformation of our very DNA.

For too long, we have viewed AI as software to be installed rather than a capability to be cultivated. The bottleneck has always been the organzation and culture, not the technology. The organizations that will thrive this year are not those with the most expensive software licenses, but those that have successfully shifted from a “rollout” mentality to a “change program” mentality.

Here’s a few of our thoughts from across the network of what 2026 holds:

The return of ‘slow thinking’

This shift begins with a counterintuitive truth: the advantage of non-profits in an AI world is entirely human. As algorithms become faster and more commoditized, the value of “slow” human thinking skyrockets. We don’t need humans to process data at the speed of light; we need them to exercise judgment, empathy, and critical analysis - the very things the models cannot do.

We think 2026 sees a move toward “cognitive training” rather than tool-focused tutorials. Learning when to shut the laptop and bring out pen and paper to do some real deep thinking and planning. We need a workforce that uses AI to automate the mundane tasks so they can double down on the complex, relational work that drives our missions.

The apprenticeship gap

There is a hidden risk to the “efficiency” narrative that we must address this year: the erosion of on-the-job learning. Historically, junior staff learned their craft by doing the grunt work - drafting the press release, summarizing the policy paper, scrubbing the donor list. Now, AI does that in seconds.

In 2026, we face an urgent responsibility to reimagine the entry-level role. We cannot allow the bottom rung of the career ladder to disappear. Instead, we should train our youngest staff to be editors and strategists from day one, treating AI not just as a tool for output, but as a sparring partner for their professional development. If we don’t, we risk hollowing out the sector’s future leadership.

The end of delegation

This cultural shift cannot happen if leadership is absent. We still see too many Executive Directors who claim to be “on board with AI” while delegating the entire strategy to the Head of IT. This is an abdication of duty. You cannot steer a ship if you refuse to touch the wheel.

We need leaders who actually use the tools daily to understand the grain of the material they are asking their teams to build with. Without that tactile familiarity, organizational change doesn’t stand a chance.

The art of the scaled pilot

How do we execute this without breaking the bank or the spirit of our teams? The answer lies in the “scaled pilot.”

In 2026, we must stop being pushed into massive, monolithic rollouts before we are ready. Similarly, doing multiple small pilots without understanding how to turn these into strategic value is equally damaging. The most successful implementations we’ve seen recently, particularly in work with forward-thinking non profits, have come from small, rigorous pilots that prove ROI before scaling. This approach builds confidence, brings the skeptics along slowly, and doesn’t break the bank. It allows us to fail small so we know what works and what doesn’t.

Beyond efficiency

Ultimately, this is about moving away from just talking about efficiency. For the last three years, the conversation has been about doing what we already do, only faster and cheaper. The exciting, and yes, terrifying conversation we need to have is about our operating models.

If AI can handle 80% of the drafting, data synthesis, and administrative triage, what does that free us to do? Does it mean we can serve more beneficiaries? Does it change the nature of our advocacy?

Have thoughts of your own? What are your plans for 2026?

Remember, we still have a few places left for our first Free non-profit AI workshop on 28th January at 2pm (EST). We’ll discuss all of the above in a peer learning informal environment.

Reply to this email or send us a message if you are interested in joining.

3) 🌟 Interesting News

Free 2026 Fundraising Calendar (Bid Beacon)

Helium AI Launches ‘AI for Cause’ Initiative to Support Nonprofits with Enterprise AI Solutions (The CSR Universe)

Can the Fight Against AI Revitalize the US Labor Movement? (Non Profit Quarterly)

4) 🌐 From Across the Network

• We’re launching an AI Capability Workshop to develop how your non profit implements AI. Get in touch to be involved.

• Have an event, case study, gathering or interesting insight you’d like to share with the network? Drop us a note by replying to this email.

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