COMMUNITY-ROOTED AI EQUITY INITIATIVE
ALL IN OUR HAND
The future is being designed right now. AI in Our Hands exists to make sure it is designed with us — not around us.
A community-rooted AI equity initiative helping people most likely to be impacted by AI — and least likely to be in the rooms where it is shaped — use AI, shape AI, and make AI.
THE MOMENT
Why This Matters
Generative AI is not just a technology trend. It is a structural inflection point. Moments like this have a pattern: they widen inequity or they expand opportunity — depending on who has access, who builds fluency, who shapes use cases, and who is invited into ownership.
Communities navigating displacement risk, workforce disruption, and historic exclusion from the rooms where technological futures are designed cannot afford to be passive in this moment. AI in Our Hands is built on the belief that they do not have to be.
“We need moral imagination — ways to be lifted out of the present into the realms of hopes, possibilities and dreams.”
— Ame Lambert, Ph.D.
OUR INITIATIVE CORE
The Three-Part Framework
Designing community agency through practical milestones.
1. USE AI
Practical, accessible AI fluency for everyday work, learning, creativity, organizing, operations, and opportunity-building. No tech background required.
FLUENCY FIRST
2. SHAPE AI
Community voice, ethical discernment, cognitive immunity, and collective agency in deciding how AI should and should not be used. Because fluency without judgment is not enough.
DECISION ALIGNMENT
3. MAKE AI
Pathways into building, designing, governing, and imagining tools that serve community needs — in workforce development, climate resilience, education, and social innovation.
CREATION SYSTEMS
WHO THIS IS BUILT WITH AND FOR
Priority Communities
Our design focuses deeply on networks, individuals, and collectives vulnerable to technical transitions or excluded from historical technical planning.
Women and Black women
Climate-affected and climate-vulnerable communities
Experienced, displaced, and displacement-vulnerable workers
Youth, educators, and families
Immigrants, refugees, and multilingual communities
Anyone building durable skills and discernment for a changing world
COORDINATING PLATFORM ACTIONS
Program Pathways
First Steps AI Labs
Introductory, hands-on sessions for leaders, staff, educators, families, and community members.
Next Steps AI Labs
Practical workflow-building sessions applying AI to real needs and real work.
Listening Sessions + Insight Briefs
Community-grounded sensemaking to surface needs, concerns, and design principles.
Strategy Sessions + Roadmaps
Support for organizations seeking thoughtful, responsible AI adoption.
Convenings
Cross-sector gatherings bringing community, education, workforce, technical, philanthropic, and civic leaders into shared conversation
HOW IT STARTED
Origin Story
AI in Our Hands began with a possibility and agenda-setting conversation in Portland, Oregon — a gathering of Black leaders working across education, workforce development, community development, entrepreneurship, technology, health, and civic life.
That first conversation affirmed something larger: communities do not only need access to AI tools. They need trusted spaces to explore, question, practice, imagine, and shape how these tools intersect with existing work for thriving.
Future Set Thriving serves as the coordinating hub, working with anchor partners and implementation partners to build a practical, community-rooted ecosystem over time.
ECOSYSTEM BUILDING
AI in Our Hands is being built as an ecosystem, not a one-time program.
We welcome conversations with funders, implementation partners, technical partners, community organizations, educators, workforce leaders, civic leaders, and mission-driven institutions who want to help ensure that AI expands opportunity rather than deepening inequity.