Building in the Open

Six findings came up often enough, and from enough different corners of the room, that they stopped being anecdotes. They are the spine of this paper. Each becomes a chapter.

Put a postpartum mental-health team, an LGBTQ+ youth charity, a public-health advocacy group, a Navy SEAL transition foundation and a gender-equity organization on the same call and ask them what is hard about building with AI. You would expect different answers. However, they gave more or less the same one; trust, culture, and not knowing what the reclaimed time is actually for. No amount of funding can answer this question, and this is why a small group of grantee organizations decided to stop trying to answer this alone and instead unite on shared values.

In December 2025 the OpenAI Foundation announced the first wave of its People-First AI Fund, $40.5 million in unrestricted grants to 208 community nonprofits across the US. The organizations in this paper are a self-organized group from within that cohort. We meet every two months, convened by Whitelabel alongside the AI for Non-Profits Network, a weekly briefing that reaches more than 4,000 nonprofit leaders. Whitelabel is also a participant in its own right, as it builds a postpartum app with Social Creatures under the same grant program.

A note on method.The sessions are conversations rather than presentations, kept deliberately loose so that attendees discuss what is actually going wrong rather than give a polished update. Those who do share a demo also come with questions for the group, and from there everyone works together on the struggles they share; trust, culture and what to do with the time AI frees up. This paper pulls together what was said, with quotes taken from the recorded transcripts and lightly edited for readability.