Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics

Nonprofit AI: UN AI Report, Data Sovereignty, UBI and UBC

• Community IT Innovators • Season 7 • Episode 49

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Carolyn Woodard covers the UN's first-ever independent scientific assessment of AI — and what its findings mean for nonprofits navigating questions of data rights, economic disruption, and who actually benefits from AI's rapid rise. This episode connects the global governance conversation to practical tools and timely opportunities your organization can act on right now.

From the Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement to a free geospatial tool built by a nonprofit, to two fellowship programs with deadlines this week, there's a lot here for organizations at every stage of AI engagement.

This episode covers:

  • Released July 1, the UN's Preliminary Report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI — co-chaired by AI scientist Yoshua Bengio and Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa — warns that AI is advancing faster than governments can keep up, and that the window for effective global governance is open but closing. The US controls 75% of the world's top AI computing power; China holds another 15%.
  • The Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement holds that data about a community belongs to that community, not to whoever collected it. This principle, developed largely by Indigenous communities, is one of the most fully realized frameworks for data rights globally and directly informs broader movements like the Better Deal for Data (discussed with Jim Fruchterman last Friday). The Indigenous Data Alliance has an open application for its year-long paid Indigenous Data Champions Fellowship, open to Indigenous individuals working with Tribal Nations, Alaska Native communities, Native Hawaiians, or Indigenous Island Territories. Deadline: August 1.
  • Beacon, from nonprofit DataKind, is a free geospatial platform that you can use to overlay public data on health, housing, food access, demographics - with your own program data, to generate maps and insights. DataKind does not sell your data, doesn't share it without consent, and writes its privacy policy to GDPR standard. As with any platform, consult your privacy officer before uploading sensitive constituent data.
  • GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is the EU's gold standard for data privacy, and it applies to your organization if anyone in the EU interacts with you, regardless of where you're based. Core principles: collect only what you need, be transparent, get consent, tell everyone in your database if you have a breach, and honor deletion requests. Note: California's CCPA/CPRA is modeled on similar principles, though most nonprofits are exempt from that law. Even if neither applies to you, these are excellent data hygiene standards for any organization that wants to maintain community trust.
  • UBI (Universal Basic Income) gives individuals direct cash payments with no strings attached. UBC (Universal Basic Capital) gives people an ownership stake in AI companies, so they share in the wealth AI generates. Senator Bernie Sanders recently introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would give the public a 50% ownership stake in major AI firms. Anthropic's June 2026 Economic Policy Framework also proposed sovereign wealth funds and equity-sharing as potential redistribution mechanisms — acknowledging that the companies building these tools see real policy problems ahead.
  • Two fellowship deadlines this week: the OpenAI People-First AI Fund offers grants to US community nonprofits in legal aid, community arts, and local journalism — no AI experience or OpenAI tools required, deadline July 15. Claude Corps from Anthropic places early-career fellows at nonprofits for one year at $85K; both fellow and host org applications for the October 2026 cohort close July 17. Note: host orgs must currently be Claude for Nonprofits customers to apply.

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Carolyn Woodard

Hello, and welcome to the Community IT Innovators Midweek Nonprofit AI check-in. My name is Carolyn Woodard. I'm the outreach director for Community IT, and I'm fascinated by this moment and the rapid rise of AI, generative AI, and AI agents, and the impact that that is having on nonprofits, how nonprofits are using AI or should use AI, best practices that are emerging, the role of nonprofits in AI governance, and the increasing impacts that AI tools are going to have on all of the sectors and communities that we care about, from education to environment to workforce to health to pretty much all aspects of our lives are really going to be impacted by AI, are already being impacted by AI.

Carolyn Woodard

So this midweek check-in is a way for us to check in together, to get smarter together. I'm not an expert in AI. Nobody is right now. But I'm going to share some news, some resources with you, and just talk about, keep talking about what's going on in nonprofit AI every week.

Carolyn Woodard

We've talked a lot in this podcast about concentrations of power and imbalances of power, whether, how nonprofits can have agency, how philanthropy can have agency, and how we ourselves as individuals can be participants in what's happening to us with this rapid rise in AI.

Carolyn Woodard

So last week there was this really big report from the UN on AI, and it's really fascinating. So there's a short executive summary. I'll share that note with you in the show notes so you can read it yourself. It's very interesting because it is really positioning itself as a report with uh trying to build up the evidence. What is happening? So

Carolyn Woodard

It was released on July 1st. Uh, it is called the Preliminary Report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, the first ever global independent scientific assessment of AI capabilities, risks, and impacts. There were 40 scientists from every UN region that were involved. Um, and the co-chairs were Yashua Bengio, one of the founding scientists of modern AI and a Turing Award winner, so he knows what he's talking about. And Marissa Ressa, who is a Nobel Priest Prize-winning journalist and democracy advocate from the Philippines. So the co-chair pairing is a signal, right? This is about democracy and human rights, not just a technology assessment. You know,

Carolyn Woodard

Kind of quick go over the findings. AI is advancing faster than governments can keep up. It was very interesting. There are several points in the executive summary where they talk about even technology-advanced nations don't usually have the capacity to examine and understand and create policies for these technologies, the AI technologies. So it's not just a you know developing world nation. It is a worldwide nation that the hands, the the power to understand these models and tools and um to to understand what they're doing is concentrated in a few people and companies.

Carolyn Woodard

And the governments, for the most part, don't have the capacity to keep up with like at a policy level and at a scientific level, understanding how the tools work and what they're doing. And we saw that recently with the mythos, you know, it was gonna be released and then it was gonna be delayed, and now it might be released, and all of that issue. So I thought that was interesting for the UN report to say this is a worldwide problem. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

There is an opportunity, a window to establish an effective global governance, but that window, this report says, is not gonna stay open for long. It says that the technology is already primarily in the hands of a very small number of companies and countries and people. The US controls 75% of the computing power among the world's top 500 AI supercomputers. China accounts for another 15%. Companies in those two countries develop almost all the leading general purpose models. And this report warns that this concentration could lead to authoritarian capture of the technology and undermined democratic accountability. So

Carolyn Woodard

Whether AI ultimately narrows inequalities or widens them worldwide, whether it strengthens or weakens democracy, whether it strengthens or weakens human rights, safety, and security will depend largely on how quickly the world builds governance that is able to keep pace with the innovation that we're seeing right now.

Carolyn Woodard

The potential benefits are real. The panel says that AI deployed thoughtfully can support progress toward the sustainable development goals of the UN. It can advance health science, the healthiness of people generally, solve health problems that are have been uh unsolvable up to now, but maybe uh able to be solved with this type of technology, and can increase access to education. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

I'm gonna put that in air quotes because we know what's happening to education in the United States and the the role that AI is playing in that. But um, you know, it's it is interesting. If you think about um just even translation, right? Like the ability of translation tools now is so much greater than it was even last year or two years ago. And that opens up opportunities that weren't there before. So that type of an approach to education uh and interactions, maybe maybe what they're kind of we can think about in terms of uh AI and education globally.

Carolyn Woodard

But the panel is explicit that its role is to present scientific evidence. It is not the panel where regulation is going to start and be decided and debated. It doesn't tell governments what to do. But what it does provide is an evidence base. So trying to consolidate and universalize uh data streams and evidence that companies are trying to safeguard, that advocacy groups are trying to spread, that governments also are trying to understand and use for their own policy and governance. So those are separate streams that the UN is advocating would be good to build out the capacity to see that kind of data and evidence in one place for those policymakers, advocacy groups, and of course companies. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

Why this matters to nonprofits, um, so as we all know, this isn't abstract for all of us. I mean, you may be in a place where you can say, Oh, I can think about AI tomorrow, but I guarantee you that the people that you care about, the communities you care about are being impacted by AI right now. And that is going to have huge impacts on your work that you do. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

Whether or not you use it to do your work, the communities where you work are going to have different problems and different capacity to solve those problems as AI continues to evolve rapidly and make commercial AI continues to make inroads into every community on earth, basically.

Carolyn Woodard

Data governance frameworks, uh like the better deal for data that we talked about last Friday, if you heard that uh with Jim Fruchterman, um, that's really important right now. Which communities benefit from AI and which don't, is you know, it's really up in the air at the moment. And we know if we leave it in the hands of the companies, um we talked about we may see another, another uh robber-baron age that's gonna take a progressive movement, progressive age to react to um that concentration of wealth and power uh and technology, you know, in a handful of uh people and companies. Um so

Carolyn Woodard

The UN is trying to give governments and advocates a common language to work from and a common set of data to work from. So it's important for nonprofits to understand that language and that data too. I will share the link to the full report and of course that the executive summary in the show notes. And I urge you to have a look at that. So

Carolyn Woodard

The UN report found that AI development is concentrated in a handful of countries and companies and people. But the data that those systems are trained on, the data that flows through your tools, the tools that your nonprofits use, comes from communities everywhere. And there's this growing understanding and question about who has the rights to that data. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

It's the center of a movement that's been building for years around Data Sovereignty. And uh that connects right to what we talked about on Friday with Jim about um nonprofits protecting our data. Our data is protected in some ways because it's in so many millions of different little silos, if you are working at a typical nonprofit. Um, but the this data sovereignty movement, um, I just I find it fascinating. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

Jim mentioned that you know, Indigenous people are really at the forefront of this question and building these uh robust frameworks around ownership of data. So if you go back to you know, not about us, without us, uh the indigenous communities uh should own their health, their land, their culture, their governance, their people.

Carolyn Woodard

The data about those sectors belongs to the community, not to the people who collected it. So I'll say that again. The data about you as a person and in a community should belong to you, not to someone who collects it.

Carolyn Woodard

It's a very fully developed framework for data rights globally. Um, it influences how broader data governance conversation happens. It really influences how the UN thinks about data, of course. Not whether the UN is doing this framework perfectly, but um, the philosophy of who owns the data and understanding that question of who owns the data is so central to you know what's going on right now with AI tools that were built from data that was scraped from you know billions of us uh without consent. So

Carolyn Woodard

The Indigenous Data Alliance is a leading organization advancing this work in the United States. I'll just mention quickly they have an open application right now for the Indigenous Data Champions Fellowship, which is a year-long paid fellowship for 20 Indigenous leaders. Uh, it is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. It is open only to Indigenous individuals working for or on behalf of tribal nations, Alaska Native communities, Native Hawaiians, or Indigenous island territories. The deadline is August 1st, if you know someone who wants to apply for this, and it's going to include AI and Indigenous rights explicitly in the training that goes with this year-long fellowship. So please share. That'll be in the show notes, of course.

Carolyn Woodard

We've been talking a lot about data and how it belongs to the communities it represents, not to the platform that holds it, to the nonprofit that collected it, to the funder who required it as part of uh their grant-making guidelines. Um, so I wanted to point you to another resource you may already know about. Uh, this uh there's a nonprofit called Data Kind, which is a 501c3, not a commercial vendor, and they have created a free geospatial data platform called Beacon, which lets you overlay publicly available data on economic security, health, housing, food access, demographics, um, census data with your own program data.

Carolyn Woodard

So you can generate place-based maps and insights, you can use AI tools on the maps and data that you are able to generate in this way. So you can identify service gaps, you can target outreach, you can strengthen your grant application, you know, put all of that uh public data right in uh what how you understand what you're doing and what you're telling funders that you're doing. Um, so it helps you understand where your community is being reached and where there are gaps. Um, you know,

Carolyn Woodard

You could use it for, you know, zoning for data centers. You could use it for, you know, if you want to fight a Walmart coming into your community or, you know, whatever it is, advocate for more grocery stores, you know, whatever you're thinking about, talking about environmental data where you have conservation, that sort of thing. So

Carolyn Woodard

After talking with Jim on Friday about how many companies uh you'll find way down in the Terms and Services Agreement that they have access to all of your data. Um, and

Carolyn Woodard

I, you know, came across this recently at a presentation about an AI phone answering tool where the company said that they had eight years of phone answering data to work from. And I was like, hmm, I wonder if all of your clients knew that. When you get that this conversation is being recorded, and you're like, and they're clearly not recording it for training purposes, they may also still have been recording it just for their own database. And it was interesting because this company that does this voice, uh, voicemail, voice, you know, answering services now is the some of their clients are 100% AI, voice answers the phone. And uh so as you can see, workforce development that is a big blow right there, just to people who used to answer the phone. Now, whether they wanted to have to answer the phone or not, um, they've been replaced. So um

Carolyn Woodard

Going back to data privacy, which is something that Jim and I talked about, uh uh Data Kind explicitly does not sell data, they don't share it outside organizations without your consent. And their privacy policy is written to the GDPR standard, which is a more protective European framework that um than is required in the United States. Um, you can request your data be deleted at any time. There's certain um you know structures and requirements that are built into GDPR. Um so

Carolyn Woodard

If you have client records, sensitive program participant information, you know, that should be data sovereign, uh, you definitely would still want to think about what you're uploading to Beacons tool. But I just I think it's an interesting tool that we were talking about, similar ideas with Jim of you know, how can you take because a lot of nonprofit data is in these silos at our own organizations, but would have a lot of more valuable insight to you if it could be connected up to some other databases. And so this Beacon uh model is one way that they're kind of tackling that question. So exploring public data overlaid with your program data is a mission-aligned tool that you know could be very valuable to your organization. If you haven't heard about it already, I will share that in the show notes. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

If you don't know what GDPR is, uh it stands for the General Data Protection Regulation. It's a European Union law. It's a kind of global gold standard for data privacy. Um, I'm sure there are people who argue that it doesn't go far enough, but it definitely goes farther than the United States laws do. I think California has a similar law on data that is modeled after the GDPR. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

It applies based on where your data subject is located, not where your organization is. So if anyone in the European Union, a donor, program participant, a website visitor, a volunteer interacts with your organization, GDPR does apply to you. Common triggers include international fundraising, educational programs, volunteer coordination, serving beneficiaries in EU countries, that sort of thing. So uh

Carolyn Woodard

The basic principles are that you should be collecting only data you actually need. You should be transparent about where you're collecting it. That should be in your privacy policy anyway. You should get explicit consent, you should make it easy to withdraw consent, and you should tell people within 72 hours if there's a data breach and you need to honor requests to access, correct, or delete the data. Sometimes that's referred as the you know the right to be forgotten. So

Carolyn Woodard

Even if GDPR doesn't strictly apply to your organization, these principles are an excellent foundation for any nonprofit that wants to maintain trust with communities. Um, so you know, it's kind of a basis also for this better deal for data movement that Jim was talking about on Friday.

Carolyn Woodard

I will share two practical guides if you're kind of wondering again, like what is GDPR? Uh Whole Whale has written an article specifically for nonprofits on how to understand what you need to know about GDPR. And there's also a compliance checklist by User Centrics that might be useful to you. So I'll put those in the show notes.

Carolyn Woodard

So this all is making me think about Data Sovereignty, the UN report, um, the same underlying question. Uh, as AI generates enormous wealth and power on the back of our data, um what who benefits and who owns that? So

Carolyn Woodard

You may be seeing two terms in the news recently. I've been seeing them and I wasn't totally sure what the what they meant and how they were different from each other. So there's UBI and UBC. So I'm just gonna quickly go over what they are.

Carolyn Woodard

Universal Basic Income is abbreviated UBI. It's a fairly, at this point, it's an older idea. It's maybe familiar to many of you, that uh the government would give every person a regular cash payment with no strings attached. So, unlike SNAP or other types of benefits where you're really restricted in what you can use it on, this idea of universal income is um, and it's been tried in several communities, and you know, there's lots of research on it, like what the effects are, the um pros and cons, and different models for doing it. Does everyone get, you know, a thousand dollars a month, or how does it work basically?

Carolyn Woodard

But the idea, the underlying idea is that you just get money. You as a person know what you need to spend money on. You don't need someone uh monitoring you and patrolling like what you're if you're buying an apple or buying popcorn, you know, that should be your decision to make. And that when given that decision, as you know, people who have an income make those decisions every day, what they're gonna buy with their income. Uh, when you this essentially you're giving people an income, and then uh the a lot of the research suggests that they do in fact make the decisions. They're the best, they're the people best situated to know what they need to spend money on, basically. Um, so uh that is called uh Universal Basic Income.

Carolyn Woodard

Astonishingly enough. Sam Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI, uh, was a prominent supporter of Universal Basic Income for years and actually put millions of dollars into a pilot program to study it. Uh recently he has shifted his position, saying he doesn't believe in it as much as he once did, that a fixed cash payment can't really address some of these diff deeper questions of who owns the AI and kind of redistributing that benefit more universally might go beyond just a fixed cash payment.

Carolyn Woodard

And so this new idea is growing of Universal Basic Capital. And I think the two things could go hand in hand, but uh basically universal basic capital, which we talked about a couple of episodes ago when um I talked about Bernie Sanders' introduction of the AI sovereign wealth fund, that everyone in the United States would benefit from ownership in companies that were over a certain profit level, uh, would then uh half of their uh profits, half of their, not their profits, half of their stock would go into this fund and the fund would distribute the dividends to all Americans. Um that's an interesting idea from Bernie. Uh

Carolyn Woodard

The idea is, of course, if AI is going to generate enormous wealth, everyone should get a share of that upside, not just the already wealthy who were able to invest in it, or the executives who, you know, I was employee number six at Anthropic, and now I'm a gazillionaire. Woo-hoo for me. California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed an executive order in May directing the state to study how that would work. And of course, Silicon Valley is in California, so big implications there.

Carolyn Woodard

Although, you know, I mentioned Bernie and Newsom, like it has drawn interest from across the political spectrum. There are people at the Heritage Foundation who are thinking about this. And people with very different politics landing on similar concerns about this unhealthy concentration of wealth and power in who benefits from AI. The Atlantic recently reported on the revival of this idea that Universal Basic Capital. And so, you know, it's getting a lot more press now. That Atlantic article is paywalled, but if you do have a subscription or you can create a free account, you can see it.

Carolyn Woodard

I think it's interesting that Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, also published an economic policy framework in June that raised the possibility of an AI sovereign wealth fund as a redistribution mechanism. So they also are either seeing that this is going to create problems in well, which we'll talk about talk about, we have talked about with the workforce. And so, you know, how do you have consumers if there are certain jobs that are no longer exist? And so

Carolyn Woodard

Universal Basic Income is a cash floor for those people. Universal Basic Capital is an ownership stake. Both are responses to the same underlying worry, both that AI is concentrating enormous wealth in a very few hands, and that certain types of jobs, like entry-level jobs, may go away completely. And then what does that do to employment? How do you get a more senior-level job if you can never get an entry-level job? Or if the types of jobs where you would be trained by more senior employees just don't exist. So you can never get training, so you can never become a senior employee. So interesting to think about.

Carolyn Woodard

As nonprofits, this is a conversation our sector should be interested in, informed on, and part of.

Carolyn Woodard

I want to close with a couple quick deadlines that I talked about earlier. The OpenAI People First AI Fund is a grant program to U.S. community nonprofits, organizations that are connecting people to services like legal aid, public benefits, community arts and culture, and local journalism. The deadline is July 15th, which is next week. So there's no requirement to use OpenAI tools when you receive these grants. They are open to apply to. So just wanted to point that out. So have a look at that. So

Carolyn Woodard

I also wanted to let you know about the Claude Corps from Anthropic, which we talked about a couple of episodes ago. Those applications close July 17th for the first cohort that starts in October 2026. So that is both for people who want to apply to become a Claude Corps Fellow and be placed at a nonprofit for a year, and for organizations that want to have a Fellow placed at their organization. Quick flag: you need to be a client of Claude. So you have to be using Claude for nonprofits to apply to receive a Fellow.

Carolyn Woodard

The uh applications are rolling. So this is just the application for the fall cohort. There will be another cohort in January. So if you miss the deadline for this fall, I'm not sure when it will reopen after the, you know, everyone gets those applications in. So just keep an eye out of uh when that opens up again to apply to become in the next cohort or to receive a Fellow. But for October 2026, uh the deadline is July 17th. And you can read all about it. I will include those, the application uh and FAQ links on the show notes.

Carolyn Woodard

That's what I wanted to leave you with uh today. I hope you're staying cool. Uh the heat seems to be cooling off. Um I know we've been talking about data centers and the heat placing them under strain as well in the electric grid. So if that hasn't been impacting you, um, I hope that you are getting through it, have gotten through it. And as always, uh we'll be back on Friday with our regular pod on multiple different topics, and then every Tuesday with nonprofit AI. So until then, take care.