Yes, You Can Help to Shape Artificial Intelligence: A Call to Action for Nonprofit Professionals

Operational Kindness
Jun 17, 2025
3 min read

If you’ve ever felt that artificial intelligence is something happening to us, not with us, you’re not alone. But here’s the truth: nonprofit professionals have an urgent, powerful role to play in shaping how AI evolves.

And the stakes couldn’t be higher.

AI is already influencing decisions about education, healthcare, criminal justice, and social services — sectors where nonprofits work every day. Whether you're using tools like ChatGPT to write grants or navigating policy implications around bias and misinformation, your feedback, your perspective, and your values matter.

Make it a practice to talk back and interact with your Artificial Intelligence platform of choice.

🧠 Why It Matters

Our recent What AI Wants Nonprofit Leaders to Know survey report, which you can download on our homepage, found that while 82% of nonprofit professionals are already experimenting with AI tools, only 14% work in organizations with a clear AI policy or framework. Most are operating in a vacuum and are often curious, cautious, and overwhelmed.

But here’s the kicker: nonprofit users are not just adopters. We’re witnesses to harm. Translators of nuance. Frontline innovators. We see what the tools miss, and we must speak up.

So how can we do more than just react to AI?

💡 5 Ways to Influence the Future of AI — Right Now

1. Give Feedback Inside the Tools You Use

Every time you use a tool like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot, you’ll see a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon, or a “Was this helpful?” prompt. That’s not decorative. It’s how models learn.

✅ Flag bias

✅ Praise equitable, justice-forward responses

✅ Share detailed feedback when you can

These signals help train future model updates. You’re not just correcting an output — you’re helping steer the entire system.

OpenAI: How to give feedback
Anthropic (Claude): Share feedback via many avenues
Google Gemini: Report feedback in-app settings (choose send feedback)

2. Join Advisory Councils and Research Communities

AI companies are (slowly) waking up to the need for broader stakeholder input. Some actively seek nonprofit leaders, ethicists, and social sector voices.

You can:

Join the Partnership on AI — a nonprofit that connects civil society to tech developers
Reach out to OpenAI’s Preparedness Team to express interest in contributing community insight
Engage with AI Now Institute or Data & Society, which both run inclusive AI research and policy discussions

3. Participate in Open Source & Dataset Efforts

Open-source initiatives are one of the few places where you can directly shape the data used to train models.

Examples:

BigScience: a global open research collaboration building multilingual, inclusive datasets
Masakhane: an African-led grassroots NLP community
Stanford HELM: invites feedback on model evaluation benchmarks across many use cases

Nonprofit professionals can contribute by flagging gaps, reviewing outputs, or suggesting community-developed data sources that better reflect real people.

4. Share Stories of Harm or Success

If AI tools are missing the mark — whether through biased translations, misinformation, or erasure — don’t let it stay invisible.

✅ Document it

✅ Share examples in your professional networks

✅ Add your voice to conversations on LinkedIn, Medium, or at conferences

One-off stories can help AI companies correct issues. Shared patterns can force structural change.

Check out:

AI Incident Database – where harms are recorded and tracked
Algorithmic Justice League – for community activism around algorithmic bias

5. Use Your Power as a Buyer

Every time you advocate for AI tools at your organization, ask:

Where was this model trained?
How are bias and accuracy evaluated?
What do user protections and privacy policies look like?

Vendors respond to organizational pressure. You don’t have to be a tech company to demand justice in the marketplace.

🧭 It’s Time to Lead, Not Just Adapt

At Operational Kindness, we believe AI should be clear, kind, and grounded in human experience. It should reflect the full diversity of our lives — not just those of the loudest or wealthiest.

That’s why we created tools like the Nonprofit AI Prompt Pack and the free What AI Wants Nonprofit Leaders to Know report — to equip you with knowledge and action, not just fear or hype.

You don’t have to be a coder to shape the future. You just have to show up with the values that have always guided our work: equity, dignity, and community.