Ten foundations. $500 million. One open call.
Humanity AI's first $18M reveals what big philanthropy will fund next - plus a $25K accelerator opens Wednesday
The AI for Non-Profits Network is supported by Whitelabel.ai, an AI native fundraising platform. Clients include Livestrong, the Canadian Red Cross, Net Impact, and Hunger Free Colorado. To read about how we’re helping a local newspaper archive content and reach more people, scroll to the end of this issue.
The $500 million tell
The biggest coordinated bet philanthropy has ever made on AI is quietly showing its hand - and if you read the cards right, there’s money in it for you.
Quick recap if you missed it: last October, ten major foundations - MacArthur, Ford, Mellon, Packard, Omidyar Network, Mozilla, Doris Duke, Lumina, Kapor, and Siegel - launched Humanity AI, a pooled $500 million commitment over five years to keep AI “people-centered.” In May, they made their first moves: $18 million+, including twelve grants of $500K each.
Here’s why this matters to you even if you’ll never apply: first grants are a funder’s revealed preferences. Forget the press-release language - look at who got the checks. The pattern in the twelve:
Community-led beats credentialed. The portfolio skews toward organizations of the communities affected by AI, not think tanks studying them from a distance. Their own framing: “the communities closest to AI’s impact often hold the clearest vision.”
Specific beats general. Nobody got funded for “AI ethics.” They got funded for AI + journalism (Pulitzer Center), AI + civic education (Data & Society’s AI Civics initiative, $3M), AI + worker accountability (TechEquity).
The five key pillars: democracy, education, humanities & culture, labor & economy, and security. If your mission touches one, you’re in the frame.
The actionable part: a $10 million open call is expected to launch this summer - a single pooled application, not ten separate ones, with 501(c)(3) status as the baseline. Full criteria haven’t dropped yet, which means right now is the positioning window. Three things worth doing this week, per the analysis at Granted: map your work to ONE of the focus areas with concrete examples (not broad ethics framing), document how your community actually shapes your decisions, and draft a tight 250-word theory of change so you’re not writing it the week the deadline lands.
And this isn’t a one-off. Coordinated pooled funds are becoming the model for AI philanthropy - OpenAI’s $50M People-First AI Fund ran the same playbook this spring, with community journalism as one of its three focus areas. The organizations that learn to read these signals early will be applying while everyone else is still forwarding the announcement.
What does it actually look like when one of these grants lands at a small nonprofit? Funny you should ask - keep reading.
📡 Funding Radar
Deadlines and doors worth knowing about this week. All links go direct to the funder.
🟢 Opens Wednesday - Fast Forward Accelerator (2027 cohort) The best-known accelerator for tech nonprofits opens applications July 30 and closes September 8. $25K unrestricted grant, plus mentorship and a curriculum built specifically for nonprofit founders building tech products. You need a working MVP — early-stage is fine. If you’ve built an AI tool for your cause, this is your window. Details & application → · FAQ → We can support - get in touch - hello@aifornonprofitsnetwork.org
🟡 Closing soon — Third Wave Fund: Disability Frontlines Fund Deadline August 7. For organizations led by and serving disabled communities, particularly at the intersection of gender and racial justice. Via Purpose Possible’s funding calendar → We can support - get in touch - hello@aifornonprofitsnetwork.org
🔵 Rolling - Google Ad Grants Still the most under-used free money in the sector: $10,000/month in in-kind Google Search advertising for eligible 501(c)(3)s, rolling applications. If you’re not using it, that’s $120K/year of donor and program visibility on the table. Overview → We can support - get in touch - hello@aifornonprofitsnetwork.org
Case study: 35 years of local news, unlocked
This is the part of the newsletter where I talk about Whitelabel’s own work - this one also links to the main article.
Since 1990, the Two River Times has covered Red Bank and the towns along the Navesink and Shrewsbury Rivers in Monmouth County, New Jersey - local news, school sports, community events, the stories no one else covers. A few years ago the paper went nonprofit, and a growing reader membership is what makes the model work.
We’re now building with them, supported by OpenAI’s People-First AI Fund. Longtime readers will remember our special issue on this fund back in December, when the first $40.5M went to 208 organizations and I argued the money was “an accelerant, not a solution” - that the real barrier isn’t access to technology but the organizational capacity to absorb it. Seven months later we’re on the inside of one of these projects, and I can report: that’s exactly what the work looks like. Two things are being built:
Behind the newsroom: the paper’s 35-year archive, opened up so a reporter can surface the history behind a story in seconds instead of an afternoon of searching. The reporting is theirs and stays theirs - AI is the index, not the author.
In front of readers: three and a half decades of local reporting is a record of the community itself. Members will be able to pull on that thread on demand - the coverage of their street, their school, their business, the events they were part of - personalized to their own history in the town and delivered alongside the print edition they already value. Mission and membership revenue, from an asset the paper already owned.
Here’s the question to steal from this: what’s your organization’s archive? Decades of case files, program records, photos, annual reports, event histories - most nonprofits are sitting on a version of this. It’s usually treated as storage. Funders are increasingly treating it as raw material for exactly the kind of community-rooted AI project the pooled funds want to back.
If that sparked something, hit reply with the word “GRANT” and one line about what you’re sitting on and what you’d build - whether it’s for the Humanity AI call or anything in the Radar above. I’ll tell you honestly whether it’s a fit for our Grant Build Partner engagement - including when the answer is “you don’t need us for this one.”
One more stat before you go
From the Blackbaud Institute’s new Bridging the AI Effectiveness Gap report: 76% of donors want to know when and how your organization uses AI - but only 26% of organizations tell them. A three-paragraph AI transparency statement on your website is the cheapest trust win available right now. (More on this in a future issue.)
And whether or not you ever hit reply: if the Humanity AI call dropped tomorrow, would you know what you’d pitch? That’s the question worth taking into the week. I read every response to this newsletter - the strongest ideas (anonymized) will show up in a future issue.
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