Helping Bay Area nonprofit communities turn their own knowledge, notes, and workflows into useful AI-powered tools.
The hackathon showed that prototypes can bridge real gaps in a nonprofit's daily work. It also made clear that a once-a-year event is not enough. Nonprofit teams need ongoing ways to build with AI themselves.
Forms, timelines, task ownership, follow-up, and the coordination burden nonprofits already carry.
Participants turn messy operational knowledge into workflow websites, automations, and shared artifacts.
AI supports the community knowledge in the room instead of replacing the people who hold it.
Our first You + AI workshop supported Asians Are Strong, an AAPI-focused nonprofit in the San Francisco Bay Area, as the team prepared for its signature annual event, World of Dumplings.
Years of organizing the same community event had produced messy notes, fragmented records, and no easy way to turn that history into clear tasks, deadlines, and responsibilities.
Volunteers brought experience from consulting, real estate, operations, and engineering, with participants from Google, Canva, DoorDash, BlackRock, and the wider community.
In two hours, participants used OpenAI Codex to automate repetitive paperwork and build personalized workflow websites for event planning, follow-up, and task ownership.
Some people arrived wondering whether AI was for them. They left sensing they could steer it.
The person, organization, and community come before the tool. AI is useful only when it follows the people closest to the work.
Like human-centered computing, You + AI treats the tool as a way for communities to express, structure, and act on what they already know.
We are continuing the workshop series with Bay Area nonprofits that want to build practical AI workflows from their own operations.