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Carolyn Woodard covers new state AI rules and Fast Forward's 2026 AI for Humanity Report this week: what the most AI-forward nonprofits worldwide are learning and what the rest of us can borrow.
States are setting AI rules while federal policy stalls. California Governor Newsom signed workplace AI laws on September 30: employers cannot rely on AI alone to fire or discipline a worker, cannot use tools that predict a worker's emotional state, must tell workers when AI is behind a layoff, and cannot use AI surveillance in workplace bathrooms.
If your nonprofit has staff in California, these rules apply to you. The firing and discipline limit takes effect July 1, 2027. Maryland Governor Wes Moore, chair of the National Governors Association, is forming a bipartisan governors group on AI. Candidates in both parties now campaign on limiting data centers, a shift that began with neighbors showing up at local meetings. Keep showing up.
The AI for Humanity report surveyed 119 AI-powered nonprofits. Caveats: respondents were self-selected and tech forward, about half are in Fast Forward's portfolio, Google.org supported the research, and the report itself says it likely paints a favorable picture. Fast Forward hosts a nonprofit-focused webinar on the report Wednesday, October 7 at 1 p.m. Eastern.
This episode covers the top takeaways from the report:
- Start with the problem, not the tool. Identify the need first, then ask whether AI fits. The answer may be a process, staffing, or regular IT fix.
- Depth, not reach. 92% reported more efficient delivery, but of those that reached more people, only 13% credited AI entirely.
- The cost comes after launch. 45% name rising tool costs as their top outside threat, and 72% built on someone else's model. Staff time for monitoring, testing, and training is the cost most budgets miss.
- Even in this group, only 48% have a written acceptable use policy and only 29% review it regularly. If yours is more than a year old, put a review on the calendar.
- People, not tools. The top enabler was a champion (64%), but a single champion is a single point of failure. Back that person with a committee, a board member, and executive support. Other enablers: experimental culture and curious staff.
- Agency, not endorsement: the technology is arriving either way. You and your organization control how it is used and who gets consulted, whether your policy is to embrace AI or not to use it at all.
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In Part 2 of the Growing IT Management Capacity at Nonprofits webinar, Carolyn Woodard and Johan Hammerstrom, CEO of Community IT, get practical about what well-managed IT looks like, and why the capacity to manage IT matters more than any tool, device, or license you can buy.
Johan walks through a simple framework: five capacities every nonprofit's IT should have, and ten security essentials that non-technical leaders can use as a checklist.
Carolyn then shares why she wrote the upcoming white paper with the Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG), reframing nonprofit IT around assets instead of deficits.
Nonprofit staff bring deep knowledge of their mission, IT vendors bring technical expertise, and funders bring capacity-building dollars and a view across their grantees. The missing piece is IT management, and closing that gap takes everyone working together.
The Q&A takes on a question many listeners will recognize: what can a one-person team wearing too many hats do to be more proactive when there's no time to think strategically? Johan's answer is to make your vendor carry the proactive work, and to build in simple checkpoints that keep the relationship accountable.
Haven't listened to Part 1 yet? Find it in your podcast feed.
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Carolyn Woodard covers a question many nonprofits keep putting off: how do you create an AI policy when you are short on time? Whether your organization is embracing AI or has decided not to use it at all, you need a written policy, because AI is already arriving inside the tools you pay for.
First, two news items with nonprofit connections. The Gates Foundation has committed $1 billion to AI for health workers, farmers, and teachers, including work to make AI tools function in languages that are poorly represented today. Carolyn looks at why some tribal and small language communities see AI as a way to preserve their languages, while others are rightly skeptical about who owns their data and culture.
Common Sense Media also named former Google trust and safety leader Tom Siegel as executive director of its Youth AI Safety Institute, funded in part by Anthropic and the OpenAI Foundation.
Then Carolyn walks through practical steps for building a policy, and explains where Community IT stands: we support nonprofits that choose AI and nonprofits that choose not to, and we want any use to be secure.
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In the first part of this two-part conversation, Carolyn Woodard and Johan Hammerstrom, CEO of Community IT, take on a question behind a lot of nonprofit IT frustration: who at your organization actually owns IT? Not who fixes it, but who plans, budgets, and makes the case for it.
Drawn from a Community IT webinar, this episode looks at what well-managed IT requires and why building management capacity does more for nonprofit resilience than buying more tools, devices, and licenses.
Johan walks through the hallmarks of well-managed IT, tied together by one theme: proactive rather than reactive. Carolyn then draws on her own experience as IT Director at an international NGO with close to 100 staff, where she managed an MSP that handled the technology but could not play a strategic role, and translated between an executive team that wanted new systems but needed to understand the budget and staffing needed to support them.
Her takeaway: owning IT is a management function, and it does not require a technology background.
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Carolyn Woodard digs into something that hits closer to home this week: a conversation with a friend who knows that parts of her job could be automated, but can't find the hour to actually build it.
That tension of fixing the plane while flying it turns out to be a well-documented, structural problem across the nonprofit sector, not a personal failing, and Carolyn spends the episode working through what the research says and what to actually do about it if you need to find the time to look into using AI.
What happens when funders and nonprofits invest seriously in nonprofit capacity and cutting down on busy work? What's the intersection with using AI to cut down on those repetitive time-sucking tasks?
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Carolyn Woodard talks with Jean Westrick, President and CEO of the Technology Association of Grantmakers (TAG), about why nonprofit technology management should be treated as organizational capacity. Jean argues that digital resilience is becoming as essential as financial resilience.
The conversation moves through why nonprofit IT funding is so hard to secure, what it looks like when funders get this right, and how technology providers and MSPs can be stronger partners.
Jean and Carolyn also preview a white paper they co-authored for TAG and Community IT, Growing IT Management Capacity at Nonprofits, built on the idea that most nonprofit technology struggles are not about the software, they are about capacity - and that growing capacity is an opportunity for funders, nonprofits, and the sector.
Want to learn more? Register for the Community IT September 23 webinar, where Carolyn and Johan Hammerstrom dig deeper into these ideas.
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A first look at Growing IT Management Capacity at Nonprofits, the white paper Carolyn authored, coming from TAG in early 2027.
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This week, host Carolyn Woodard tackles the AI story that made it onto TV and radio news this weekend: an essay from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for a deliberate slowdown in frontier AI development, followed within about 24 hours by agreement from OpenAI's Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind.
If the headlines had you feeling like you should be very afraid, Carolyn walks through what's actually happening, why the timing is worth a second look, and why nonprofits have more agency in this moment than the news cycle suggests.
She also digs into a practical question raised by Anthropic's own account bans this week: how did they know what users were asking? The answer has real implications for any nonprofit using AI tools with sensitive data.
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In part 2 of this two-part episode, Carolyn continues her conversation with CEO Johan Hammerstrom and Senior IT Consultant Nuradeen Aboki: what you actually get at the end of an IT assessment, and what to do with it.
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Carolyn Woodard covers two things this week: a quick and basic explainer of how large language models actually work under the hood, and a roundup of the best practices for using AI at nonprofits that Community IT has built up over nine months of this podcast and 3 years of our monthly webinars.
First, the basics. An LLM is not a database and it is not doing a Google search. It is predicting the next most likely word, or token, based on patterns learned from the huge amount of text it was trained on. Image and video tools work differently, using a diffusion model that refines random noise into a picture, which is why video generation costs roughly 2,000 times more energy at the data center than a text prompt. "Hallucination" or being confidently wrong is a feature, not an AI bug. OpenAI research from last year shows it is a predictable result of how models are trained to guess a fluent-sounding answer rather than say I do not know.
Then Carolyn walks through the best practices Community IT recommends for any nonprofit using AI, from naming an AI owner to keeping a human editor in the loop on anything that goes out under your name. The full version, with links to Community IT's past episodes and resources, lives in our AI for Nonprofits guide on the website.
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Is it time for an IT assessment at your nonprofit? Maybe you need an assessment for a grant requirement, a change in leadership, or a switch to a new IT provider.
In part 1 of this two-part episode, Carolyn talks with CEO Johan Hammerstrom and Senior IT Consultant Nuradeen Aboki about what a comprehensive, nonprofit-focused IT assessment actually involves, and how to tell a genuine, agnostic assessment from one that's really just a sales pitch.
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Part 2 continues next week with assessment deliverables, what a healthy nonprofit IT environment looks like, and next steps if it's time to change your IT support.
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From the publisher's feed
Community IT offers free webinars monthly to promote learning within our nonprofit technology community. Our podcast is appropriate for a varied level of technology expertise. Community IT is…