The Landscape
Featuring a note from Julie Mikuta, Co-President of Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, and Lucy Brainard, Director of Portfolio Success and Operations at Overdeck Family Foundation.
Across the social sector, nonprofits are increasingly turning to AI to amplify their impact. From guiding strategic decisions to anticipating emerging needs, AI offers exciting possibilities while also raising new questions and considerations. For organizations delivering essential community support in a rapidly changing external environment, thoughtful AI adoption can be a delicate balancing act.
With this in mind, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and Overdeck Family Foundation came together to explore how to offer a steady hand. In early 2025, we launched the AI Accelerator with Leading Educators and Playlab, and guided by Arathi Ravier. This pilot learning community aimed to uncover how philanthropy can help nonprofits build the knowledge, skills and systems to use AI responsibly and measurably improve outcomes.
Over six months, leaders from 22 organizations took part in a learning experience that blended exploration, coaching and hands-on experimentation. The participating organizations included grantees from each foundation’s Education portfolios and several from Schusterman's Criminal Justice portfolio.
Building on existing AI literacy resources and accelerators, the AI Accelerator supported participants in tool-building with a unique emphasis on grounding those tools within each organization’s context. From the beginning, the Accelerator guided teams through problem identification, early-stage solutions, prototyping, piloting and scaling. In later stages, coaches helped bridge the gap between promising prototypes and real-world implementation, enabling organizations to develop functional AI tools embedded in their missions and workflows. By the end of the program, participants reported a newfound confidence to innovate and gained a lasting network of peers for continued learning.
We too learned a great deal along the way. We discovered how funders can create environments that invite exploration in ways that are both cost-effective and efficient. We also learned that supporting grantee learning and capacity building is essential for nonprofits to adapt and thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape—and for the future of philanthropy at large. We are exploring how we can continue to support grantees through similar capacity-building efforts in the future.
In this resource, we share what we learned: the insights, questions and lessons that emerged, and how they can inform future efforts to support responsible AI adoption across the social sector. We share these findings with deep gratitude to the grantee organizations that participated, and to Leading Educators, Playlab and Arathi Ravier for their partnership in designing, planning and facilitating this program.
Julie Mikuta
Co-President, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies
Lucy Brainard
Director, Portfolio Success & Operations, Overdeck Family Foundation
Goals and Approach
We framed the AI Accelerator around four interconnected goals, each one a stepping-stone to help organizations move from exploration to practical, mission-driven AI use.
Foster and Sustain Innovation
Empower participating organizations to create AI tools that address key inefficiencies and measurably enhance program outcomes.
Promote Collaboration
Facilitate cross-organizational learning to leverage network effects, accelerate field building and increase collective impact.
Build Capacity
Develop participants' skills in design thinking, AI literacy, tool development, iterative testing and strategic implementation.
Deliver Impactful Solutions
Develop AI tools that amplify the human expertise at the heart of a nonprofit’s mission, while improving scalability and outcomes.
Program Components
To achieve our goals, we brought together 22 organizations in a six-month cohort-based learning experience from February through August 2025. The program combined several critical components.
- AI literacy curriculum that combined asynchronous content, hands-on testing and peer feedback to help participants learn AI fundamentals and advanced prompting.
- A two-day in-person design sprint so participants could practice applying design thinking methodologies and create AI prototypes that addressed real organizational challenges.
- Dedicated coaching support and bi-weekly touchpoints to offer individualized guidance and support broader group development.
- Cohort-based learning and a virtual community platform to increase cross-organizational connection, testing and knowledge-sharing.
- A focus on safe experimentation and iteration so teams could comfortably test assumptions, pivot and present works-in-progress.
Key Insights
We tracked progress through participant surveys at key milestones throughout the program, revealing three critical insights for philanthropy about how to build AI capacity in the social sector.
1. Cohort-Based Learning Created Multiplier Effects For Participants
FINDINGS
96%
of participants agreed that cross-organizational collaboration strengthened their work.
93%
of participants improved in strategic problem-solving using AI, up from 29% at the start.
95%
of participants increased their ability to explain AI to colleagues, up from 38% at the beginning.
The cohort model, composed of 22 organizations at various points in their AI learning journeys, created opportunities for organizations to learn from each other's approaches, challenge assumptions and borrow promising practices. Throughout the program, the following cohort experiences yielded great results:
- Peer learning communities supported the development of shared language and reduced the isolation many nonprofits feel when exploring new technologies;
- The in-person design sprint enabled participants to workshop problems together in real time;
- Repeated presentations helped participants gain confidence sharing implementation results and reflections; and
- Monthly coaching calls provided an ongoing forum to troubleshoot shared challenges.
Ultimately, participants became multipliers of impact—bringing what they learned back to their teams to educate colleagues and sustain momentum long after the program ended.
"I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn, experiment and grow alongside such a talented and supportive group. The experience stretched my thinking and deepened my belief in what's possible when purpose meets innovation."
Ulric Shannon
AI Accelerator Participant from Surge Institute
2. Structured Accountability Increased the Likelihood of Developing a Clear Strategy
FINDINGS
58%
of organizations had a clear AI strategy by program's end, compared to 4% at the beginning.
Dedicated time and support
Grantees shared that having dedicated time and support made deeper AI exploration possible.
"The accelerator pushed our team to reimagine how AI can enhance human-centered leadership. I’m leaving with new skills, a powerful product, and a renewed sense of innovation and possibility."
Harrison peters
AI Accelerator Participant from Men of Color in Educational Leadership (MCEL)
Developing an AI strategy in six months is no easy feat. To make it possible, the program leveraged structured touchpoints to help ensure challenges were actionable within the six-month timeframe. From bi-weekly coaching sessions to regular peer learning community convenings, each touchpoint helped maintain accountability and progress.
Additionally, we sought to ensure participants were equipped to develop tools with demonstrable, measurable value. Leading Educators coaches and Playlab engineers (technical experts who guide AI tool design) helped participants prioritize realistic, achievable strategies aligned with technical functionality and roadmap constraints.
3. A Safe Environment to Learn, Prototype and Pivot Was Key to Success
FINDINGS
Freedom to fail
Grantees noted the cohort encouraged “failure” as a learning exercise and pushed towards testing new and creative solutions.
100%
of participants reported gaining newfound comfort with experimentation.
Structure and accountability are critical to progress, but innovation requires risk-taking and psychological safety. To foster a safe and collaborative learning environment, we invited participating organizations that were existing grantees of ours, so they could take creative risks with our support.
We also aimed to show up ourselves as co-learners. Staff from each of our respective grantmaking organizations engaged in discussions, shared questions and experimented alongside participants. Participants shared that this gave them the confidence to try new ideas, leading to stronger, more sustainable innovation.
Finally, the steady pace of design sprints and support from coaches helped to normalize rapid prototyping and reframe “failure” as learning. The goal was not that everything would work perfectly, but that participants could try new approaches and test whether their innovations could help achieve their intended outcomes. By engaging alongside participants and encouraging freedom to "fail,” the Accelerator created a safe environment for testing and learning.
"This experience is truly a lab—a safe and supported way to learn and iterate."
Laura camp
AI Accelerator Participant from LENA
PARTICIPANT EXAMPLES
A true measure of the AI Accelerator's success was in the tools participants built and the improvements they delivered. Of the 22 participating organizations, 100% created functional AI prototypes, with 76% achieving measurable improvements in the quality of their processes or products, and 57% reporting significant time saving
The Organization: Men of Color in Educational Leadership (MCEL), a Schusterman grantee, provides male leaders of color in education with coaches who equip them with leadership skills, knowledge and support to improve success for students.
The Outcome: Participants from MCEL created an AI tool that helped their coaches review lengthy leadership assessment reports and plan feedback sessions. Before participating in the AI Accelerator, coaches had to manually read through 38-page reports for each leader—a time-consuming process that varied depending on who was completing the analysis. Now, their AI tool does the heavy lifting by pulling out key insights and ensuring every coach interprets the data the same way, informed by MCEL's established coaching framework. This streamlined approach cut coaching costs by 25% while maintaining accuracy that coaches trust completely.
The Organization: Transcend Education, an Overdeck grantee, supports educators to redesign school models, offer professional learning for school leaders and share resources to create innovative, equitable learning environments that maximize student potential.
The Outcome: Participants from Transcend created an AI “Interview Guide” that guides users through a process for interviewing students and families to surface priorities for school redesign in a simple, conversational manner. The tool replaced a complicated 17-page instruction manual, reduced the time needed to create an interview guide from nearly an hour to 10 minutes, helped users feel more confident and produced better results. By building their methodology directly into the tool, Transcend made expert-quality interviewing guidance available to their whole team while teaching users best practices along the way.
CONCLUSION
The 22 participating organizations built an organizational muscle to continue innovating, developed internal champions to drive adoption and created strategic frameworks to evaluate success. By building practical AI tools grounded in their missions, they moved from AI curiosity to AI capability, improving their ability to advance outcomes and achieve their goals.
Yet perhaps the most important lesson is for funders: In times of rapid change, creating environments where nonprofits can safely test, learn and experiment can be done cost-effectively, while yielding high results: leaders who are empowered to meet today’s needs and adapt to tomorrow’s challenges. With thoughtful guidance and support, nonprofits can become sophisticated AI adopters, using technology to strengthen their work and scale their impact.
Note: The AI Accelerator was part of Schusterman Family Philanthropies’ and Overdeck Family Foundation’s grantee capacity-building efforts, designed to support skills, strategies and network building to strengthen their work over the long term. These supports are not tied to specific grantmaking areas.
