We’re excited to have kicked off a unique AI collaboration with nine leading charities: Comic Relief, Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity, Macular Society, Mind, National Trust, Oxfam, RNIB, The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity and Water Aid. Together, we’re exploring AI’s potential, ensuring that its application is thoughtful, ethical, and impactful.
What’s the backstory?
Last year, we set out to explore the future of the third sector in the UK as part of our Good Futures programme. We spoke with 52 senior leaders to identify the most significant changes needed to ensure the sector’s relevance and sustainability, culminating in a report on the future of charity. A key takeaway was the urgent need to embrace generative AI.
We're already witnessing the rapid and profound impact AI is having on everything we do. Yet too often, organisations approach AI with a short-term mindset, focusing on immediate applications without considering the long-term implications or opportunity. For example, we frequently see an overemphasis on IT approvals, while the ethical considerations of using AI are overlooked.
So, how do we upskill charities quickly to understand AI's impact on our sector? How do we ensure that we centre our people at the heart of these decisions? And how can we design forward thinking solutions, rather than retrofitting technology to fit existing processes?
Why a collaboration?
What we quickly realised through the future of charity conversations is that there was already a lot of momentum in the sector and activity underway to explore, experiment and test opportunities around generative AI. But this activity was happening in isolation either inside charity teams, or individual siloes.
As Vicky Johnson, one of our collaboration partners from The Royal Marsden said: “Collaboration and co-creation have the potential to create transformative and lasting change for the charity sector and help to accelerate knowledge, skill and technical development in areas that can sometimes feel beyond the reach of an organisation operating on their own.”
We wanted to help bring the sector together to learn from each other, share policies, best practice and experiments, and co-create on a way forward.
That’s where the AI Collaboration comes in! Instead of each organisation navigating AI adoption alone, we’re joining forces to address shared challenges.
What’s the plan?
Over the next four months, we’ll engage in hands-on workshops, strategic planning sessions and collaborative discussions to unlock AI’s potential for optimising operations, enhancing service delivery and fundraising. These sessions will shape the development of AI policies, toolkits, and a customisable AI roadmap tailored to each organisation’s unique needs.
Our mission is to craft a collective vision for how AI can best serve the third sector, establishing practical use cases, governance principles, and guidelines for ethical AI use.
Stay tuned over the coming months as we share more updates and insights!