alongside

If AI expands what people and institutions can do, whose capability should we strengthen?

alongside puts the defining technology of our time to work for humanity’s most important missions. Together with the organizations closest to urgent needs, we turn local understanding into practical tools, stronger systems and wider impact.

“AI should expand what is possible for all of humanity, not only for those already closest to its power.”

Make Me Smile Kenya alongside The Rain Workers Findability Sciences Waya

Welcome to alongside

AI has the potential to expand what institutions can do and enable social impact organizations to fundamentally reimagine how they approach complex challenges. We want this capacity to strengthen those already working closest to human need.

alongside brings together social impact organizations, technical partners, and funders to develop culturally grounded AI solutions shaped by local knowledge and real operational needs. Our aim is to help organizations reach further with the resources, relationships, and expertise they already hold, widening their radius of impact while creating new ways to advance their mission.

We believe technology creates lasting value when it is developed with the people and institutions it is intended to serve. Our role is to create the conditions in which responsible AI solutions can be designed, tested, and scaled for meaningful impact.

Two ways to work with us

alongside labs

Together with organizations, frontline teams, and communities, we co-design, build, test, and scale responsible AI solutions around a real field need.

capacity sprint

A four-to-six-week program for your own team that turns scattered individual AI use into shared capability your organization owns.

Every project should leave more behind than a prototype.

The immediate goal is to create value in one real context. The larger opportunity is to leave behind evidence, implementation knowledge, and reusable foundations that help the next mission begin further ahead.

Students in a classroom in Tanzania crowd around a single shared laptop, seen from above.

We begin with a recurring and consequential problem, defined by the people who understand it firsthand. Before discussing technology, we establish who is affected, where current approaches fall short, and what a better outcome would actually look like.

The intervention is shaped with the organizations, frontline teams, and communities who will use it and live with its consequences. Their language, workflows, constraints, safeguards, and human support become part of the system from the beginning.

We test in real conditions and measure more than activity. We ask whether the intervention is useful, safe, trusted, and capable of improving the outcome it was built for, documenting what works, what fails, and what must change.

What proves valuable becomes more than a single project. Reusable components, implementation knowledge, and evidence help the next organization begin further ahead. What can travel is adapted, what must remain local stays local, and every new context is tested again.

What becomes possible in practice.

You do not need to arrive with an AI brief.

Bring the recurring need, the people it affects, what your team has already tried, and what must be protected. We will listen first and say honestly whether alongside labs, the capacity sprint, or another path makes sense.

talk to us See how alongside labs works

Thirty minutes. No pitch. Listening first.

Two hands reaching toward each other in soft light.

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