A few weeks ago, Digital NEST convened the OpenAI Nonprofit Jam in Salinas, part of a national event hosted by the OpenAI Academy in coordination with the Walton Family Foundation, Emerson Collective, Decoded Futures, National Center for Civic Innovation, and Fund for the City of New York that brought together over 1,000 nonprofit leaders across 10 regional hubs to develop artificial intelligence prototypes or workflows that support their day-to-day work.
Digital NEST served as a Regional Convener, bringing together Salinas-area nonprofits to increase our understanding of AI and engage with Open AI employees on how to apply it. Digital NEST staff members were in attendance to learn, ask questions, and advance our mission.
“As a tech-focused workforce development organization, we have an obligation to keep up with emerging technologies to better prepare our youth for the world of work and scale our impact,” said Digital NEST Founder and CEO Jacob Martinez in his opening remarks. “Our collective participation here today ensures that the voices of our community and first generation professional youth and their communities are represented in the rapidly evolving world of AI.
What We Learned
Before the Jam, Digital NEST staff participated in OpenAI Academy to get up to speed on the basics of AI. Then at the event, they applied those lessons directly to their day-to-day work.
Our team members explored integrations for automated AI-powered calendar management; built a customized AI-powered thought partner to develop a curriculum overview for the year, using it to bounce ideas off of and brainstorm learning activities; developed a prompting library and guide for instructors to set up their own AI instructional design assistants for their concentrations; and architected an app for rating AI prompts on a scale of 1 to 10.
“At the OpenAI Jam, I discovered there’s actually a science to writing great prompts, like a recipe for getting the best out of AI,” said Alex Rodriguez, Director of Design and Software Development at Digital NEST. “So I built a full-stack app that uses OpenAI’s API to rate the prompt and instantly remix it into a 10/10. It’s like having an AI prompt coach in your pocket.”
Why It Matters
Nonprofits are on the frontlines of workforce development and community resilience, yet some of our communities face critical gaps in funding, technical expertise, and digital capacity. This collaboration with OpenAI is helping us close those gaps by making AI tools more accessible, so nonprofits can do even more to scale our impact.
Our participation in this event is part of Digital NEST’s ongoing work to develop organizational policies around ethical AI use, explore partnerships to enhance AI literacy among staff, and integrate AI into our tech-focused career pathways for youth.
In service of our mission, our approach is grounded in our organizational values of economic justice, community, opportunity, and abundance. We aim:
- To keep up with developments in AI and ensure our youth are being prepared for high-impact careers
- To help youth to understand the impact of AI and automation on future career opportunities
- To support youth in engaging with critical questions about AI’s broader social impact as part of a conversation about the world they will inherit and shape.
- To contribute to a national dialogue about how to ensure AI tools reduce (and do not perpetuate) the divides and injustices in our country
What Comes Next
We’re excited to develop our prototypes from the Nonprofit AI Jam further and start piloting them internally. We look forward to what comes next—and we’ll keep you posted as we continue putting AI to work in support of our mission. Learn more about our tech-focused career pathways for youth at digitalnest.org/programs.
