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Nonprofit AI: Papal Encyclical and Longview Philanthropy RFP

• Community IT Innovators • Season 7 • Episode 42

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Carolyn Woodard covers a landmark moment in the global conversation about AI governance: the release of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, and what it means for nonprofits and philanthropy navigating an AI landscape increasingly shaped by concentrated power.

The encyclical, released May 25, 2026 and addressed to people of every faith and none, draws a deliberate parallel to the 1891 Rerum Novarum, which addressed the rights of workers during the Industrial Revolution. It argues that technology built and governed by a small elite cannot serve the common good, and calls for AI to be "disarmed" from the logic of competition and monopoly. Nonprofit tech thought leaders responded quickly, with voices like Cassie Gruenstein of AI x Impact, TechSoup CEO Marnie Webb, and former TAG Executive Director Chantal Forster each bringing distinct lenses: worker dignity and organizational culture, the economics of AI pricing and shared sector solutions, and the case for philanthropy to invest not just in AI adoption but in the civic institutions that shape it.

This episode also covers a cross-faith coalition context and closes with an action item: Longview Philanthropy has an open RFP funding work on AI power concentration, with a July 2 deadline.

  • Why the encyclical's arguments on power concentration, worker dignity, and environmental impact speak directly to nonprofit values, regardless of religious affiliation.
  • What three nonprofit tech thought leaders are drawing from the document for their own practice and recommendations.
  • The cross-faith convergence building around shared demands for accountability, transparency, and human dignity in AI development.
  • A concrete funding opportunity for organizations working on AI governance and power concentration.

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Carolyn Woodard

Hello, and welcome to the Community IT Innovators Midweek Nonprofit AI Podcast check-in. I'm Carolyn Woodard, your host. I'm not an expert in AI. And in this podcast, we are trying to bring you some news, stories, some resources, answer some questions, and get smarter together as a philanthropy and nonprofit sector about AI. So

Carolyn Woodard

Throughout this podcast, I've talked repeatedly about agency, and that we as humans and as community members and as nonprofit staff members and nonprofit leaders have more agency over the AI that we're using, that everyone is using than we think. And that AI isn't just a tidal wave washing over us that we have to, you know, swim or drown in.

Carolyn Woodard

And this week I was so, I never thought I would agree with this framing of it. Someone posted on LinkedIn that they never thought that the Pope would make the strongest argument yet around regulating AI and harnessing AI for the good of humanity and the good of the planet. And I have to agree, uh, this is uh really struck a chord with me.

Carolyn Woodard

It struck a chord across nonprofit and philanthropy. Uh, it was really a very vocal and very visible organization jumping into this debate and uh in a really, really visible way. So I just wanted to spend this podcast to talk a little bit about it and some reactions to it that I've seen online. Um, and it's just it's not, you know, it's not coming from a policy think tank or from a tech company, it's from the Vatican. Um and uh

Carolyn Woodard

This you know new Pope, the American Pope, uh, someone pointed out in the news stories about this that uh he owns his own iPhone, he has his own, you know, laptop, he uh is very, he has an Apple Watch. So he's very uh I don't know if I would call him a tech native, but he's um really keyed in. He's not looking at his, he doesn't have somebody else making his schedule on his on his uh iPad for him. He's he's uh been doing that himself for a while, so he's very clued into how technology is working with all of us in our day-to-day lives and the work that we do. So I think that added maybe this extra feeling of being seen and seeing what uh this document had to say. So uh

Carolyn Woodard

Pope Leo the 14th's encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, or Magnificent Humanity, was released May 25th, 2026. Uh, it centers on the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. And it's not just for Catholics. Uh, I'm not personally Catholic. Um, I'm not even all that religious. Maybe many of us are. Many of us are guided by our faith, many of us are maybe not as religious, but um, this document was uh it explicitly says that it speaks to every person of goodwill.

Carolyn Woodard

And they made a historical parallel that's deliberate. Uh, it was signed on May 15th, the 135th anniversary of the Rerum Novarum, which was a landmark 1891 encyclical on the rights of workers during the Industrial Revolution. So he was drawing a line, an explicit line between that moment of change and crisis and modernization and transformation, and our current moment of change and crisis and transformation. And

Carolyn Woodard

The encyclical doesn't reject technological progress. It writes that technology should not be considered in itself a force antagonistic to humanity, but it must always be guided by responsible and ethical use. And the encyclical argues that technology built and governed by a small elite cannot, by definition, serve the common good.

Carolyn Woodard

AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise, and access to data. And we've talked before here, and I have seen it becoming more talked about online, the ownership of data. So who owns the data? Who owns your data about yourself, everything that you've produced, and the fact that these companies scraped all of this knowledge and expertise and writing and um you know thoughts and feelings and works of art without anyone's consent, without anyone really knowing that it was happening, um, it's something that is really at the heart of a lot of our current conversation about this. And I think this encyclical like addresses that directly, that imbalance of power. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

The encyclical also argues that rapid automation could displace workers and reshape labor markets in ways that risk leaving many enforced inactivity, and that that would undermine both human dignity and social stability. It is a theological document, but it's not not just talking about theological arguments. So that concentration of power, the worker dignity, technology as a value. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

We all make these choices and we all interact with these technologies.

Carolyn Woodard

And so I just thought it was so fascinating that this big new story was coming out of the Vatican. But it isn't just a Catholic story. Um, as I said, there's it's actually kind of one of the most visible and high-profile arguments to come out of this. But what's going on right now, for the past year or so, there's a very broad cross-faith and cross-sector convergence coming around understanding and interacting with AI and the way that AI is proceeding right now with this concentration of power.

Carolyn Woodard

And that is something that I think the nonprofit and philanthropy communities have been involved in and can link up to, like this very visible document uh that's saying a lot of the things that we've been saying too.

Carolyn Woodard

There have been a couple of past consortiums that have come together. In October, Christian and Jewish leaders signed the joint statement on AI ethics, urging that AI be developed within ethical boundaries that preserve human dignity, prevent harm, and ensure the technology remains under human control. Weeks ago, a few weeks ago, there was an inauguration of the Faith AI Covenant roundtable, and that brought together representatives from the Hindu Temple Society of North America, the Baha'i International Community, the Sikh Coalition, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, alongside representatives from Anthropic and Open AI.

Carolyn Woodard

So there is this kind of shared pushback, I guess you would say, across cultures and faiths, um, and with these kind of similar demands: human dignity, greater accountability and transparency, arguing for a shared benefit, and arguing for prevention of harm.

Carolyn Woodard

I was brought aware of this both through the news, but also through some people that I follow on LinkedIn who are really just thought leaders in this space of technology, philanthropy, and nonprofits. Three voices that you might want to follow and uh follow up with.

Carolyn Woodard

One is Cassie Grunstein, who is a nonprofit strategist and the co-founder of AI x Impact, uh, which is a consulting company. She focused on what the encyclical says about workers and organizational culture and highlighted the critique of the grind culture. So, this ideology that every person must earn their worth through efficiency, turning people into resources that need to be optimized instead of, you know, humans who have lives that want to have joy and sorrow and go outside and not be grinding, you know, with three different side hustles 24-7. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

Her practical takeaway for nonprofit leaders is that in your organization, AI should augment human judgment, not accelerate people into exhaustion. And she critically says, don't let AI redesign your team's work patterns without your staff in the room. So that kind of "not about us without us" formulation that we've been using for a couple of decades now should apply to AI as well. A manager shouldn't go off with AI and then come back and present it with a bow on it of like, here's how our workflow is going to go now. It really works best if everyone involved is involved.

Carolyn Woodard

Another voice and person that you might want to follow on LinkedIn as Marnie Webb. She's the CEO of TechSoup. She has been in this space for so long and so involved in so many different nonprofit organizations around nonprofits and technology. And she um she was, I think, more interested in the economics of it and the scaling that's happening right now. Not just the bubble, the economics of the bubble, but the economics of how AI is gonna work at the scales that it can get to, and that it's becoming really expensive.

Carolyn Woodard

We've talked on this podcast before about the expense of the data centers and how you right now, like capitalism is kind of running away with as much as they can get for free in terms of electricity and water, but that eventually those costs are gonna catch up with those companies. I just found her post really interesting. It connects directly to realities that we are finding.

Carolyn Woodard

One thing that she says is to take advantage of this moment while tools are relatively new and still affordable, to build systems that work for your mission and for your community. But be careful where you're where you're how you're thinking about and where you're building ongoing AI expenses into your workflows because pricing is going to shift. I mean, we we know this already. There are some companies that are doing the nonprofit pricing with deep discount. Most are not. And

Carolyn Woodard

In addition to not giving a nonprofit discount, it's pretty clear that the reason for all of the freemium versions that get people hooked and doing this like lead loss is that as we become more and more dependent on AI in our workflows, that gives those companies an opportunity to raise the costs and change how they do the licensing. And so uh

Carolyn Woodard

What Marnie Webb was uh observing is that it's pretty clear that the pricing is gonna shift from licensing to usage and that uh every automated workflow then is gonna have a per run cost. When those prices rise, those automations could become too expensive to run. So just have this in the back of your mind as you're automating things, um, that if those prices changed, you need to think about how you're gonna have an out at that point. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

Another one of her arguments was to spread the cost across the sector. So building and sharing solutions across communities of purpose, like consortiums of anti-trafficking organizations or food banks, or libraries, or museums, or you know, after-school programs, or you know, there's lots of different sectors within the nonprofit sector that could share the cost of building common tools and testing, piloting and testing those, or could use more, you know, since it's so it's such a wild west right now, and lots of people are building really cool stuff, like having more opportunities for other organizations within those same sectors doing very similar tasks to see what you've built and maybe share in it. So a very interesting idea, something we've talked about before. I know there are several funders who are looking at this and trying to figure out how to fund kind of joint AI tools or joint AI processes. So that's something interesting to keep an eye on.

Carolyn Woodard

And then I just thought this was so fascinating, and I know it's come up several times in recent conversations, just the overall, I guess what nonprofits and and some people are feeling is like the yuckiness of participating in this global cloud-based, databased structure, and that

Carolyn Woodard

You could consider having a local or an on-device AI seriously. So it's more technically difficult, it's more advanced. Um, but that may be a strategy to control costs, um, ensure your privacy because you're just running it yourself, and uh lessen the environmental impact. So if you're an organization and you're, I don't know, own your building and have solar on your roof that's running your whole building off of the grid, then it's kind of a reversal, right?

Carolyn Woodard

We went from having the server room, which was uh very distributed, you know, air conditioning and energy use, and you just had your server in your office, but it wasn't optimized conditions for those servers. So we all moved to the cloud, started using these data centers, which can make you know this nice building that's really cool and um keeps all the computer servers running perfectly, and you know, like the optimum uh humidity range and temperature range and all of that. And that was um optimizing that,

Carolyn Woodard

But there may be room for a movement back to having local and small structure uh you know servers basically for your AI to run on very locally with your own energy potentially. And uh, of course, in that case, you need to have those firewalls again and all the security. It's just fascinating to think about this as a you know a moment for that kind of reversal. Um, you know, forward thinking, but um, you know, not too far ahead, probably.

Carolyn Woodard

And then another voice that I would recommend following on LinkedIn and following anywhere, basically. She just has so such a thought leader in this space is uh Chantal Foster, who is the previous executive director of TAG, the Technology Association of Grant Makers. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

She had a very long post sharing her favorite passages from the encyclical and the um idea that AI needed to be disarmed. This is what the encyclical says is the Pope calls on us to disarm AI, and in the sense of not rejecting it and not, I guess, fighting it itself, um, but freeing it from that mentality of armed competition between companies, between countries, that some people have AI and have the power over it and some people don't, and that competition. So disarming AI in the sense of lowering those barriers, you know, bringing, tearing down a wall and making it an open meadow where everyone has access to the same tools for the good of us all.

Carolyn Woodard

She really uh well, kind of landed on this spot that um AI can become human-friendly, open to debate, plural, welcoming, and accessible. And yes, she quoted the encyclical says to disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.

Carolyn Woodard

Another quote was "a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few." And "like the natural environment, the digital ecosystem can be preserved or exploited, shared or monopolized." And it's so,

Carolyn Woodard

It's just so fascinating how this all harkens back to what was happening in the 1880s, 1890s, with the consequences of the Industrial Revolution being felt. I mean, had been being felt, like you read Dickens and you're like, well, everything is covered in dirt from uh all the factories and the smokestacks. So uh we're seeing that again. It's coming back around. Um, but I just

Carolyn Woodard

I want to leave you with her closing comments from her LinkedIn post, which I will share all of these links in the show notes. Uh, you'll be able to check them out yourself. But um, she concluded her post by saying,

Carolyn Woodard

"My friends in philanthropy, we have been summoned." I just love that. "The AI strategy cannot only mean helping nonprofits adopt tools or helping foundations become more efficient. Funders also need to invest in the civic, labor, public interest, and community institutions that can shape AI before it its defaults fossilized power through speed and opacity." And then she quotes the encyclical, which says, "We must oversee the transformation in advance."

Carolyn Woodard

So if you're thinking, well, I'm not religious, my organization isn't religious, um, does this encyclical have anything to say to us? And the short answer, I hope your feeling is yes. Um, for one thing, as I said, it's uh addressed to the world, it goes beyond um just the Catholic Church. A lot of people are responding to it very energetically, um not to the theology pieces of it, but to the governance, power concentration, human rights, environmental impact. And those are issues that the nonprofit sector, like that's what we deal in. So I that's I think why I felt it spoke so strongly to me. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

I love that there's this cross-faith chorus from the different religions around the world uh making these same demands uh that nonprofit tech leaders can make as well. It's it's uh it's not a coincidence. There's lots of communities arriving independently at this same set of values or arriving together, you know, reading each other and reacting to each other and feeling, oh, this person is articulating my concerns too, or this faith is seeing the same uh worries and concerns that I have, or and can see the same opportunities for a more just and uh accessible AI that is not perpetuating more harm.

Carolyn Woodard

I want to come back to something that I've said before about agency and that we're gonna be stronger as a sector if as we are becoming AI literate, understanding how it's changing our sector, and speaking together to those tech companies and to our governments about the way we want these tools to operate. We want more safety and security, we want more accessibility, we want more ownership, we want uh more acknowledgement of ownership, who owns your data about yourself. And uh I just I I reacted to the encyclical. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

If you've seen it, I hope you've reacted to it too, or maybe this would help you um seek it out and think about how you feel about it uh and what it is articulating in that document. AI is not a force of nature, it's created by people, uh, by a few people right now who have a lot of control over it. It's not a wave that's washing over us that's just gonna sweep us away whether we want to or not. Um, and

Carolyn Woodard

So thinking about your choices, and I think overall I keep coming back to this becoming as AI literate as you can be. If you're not a political person, not a technology person really, not a religious person, uh, it it doesn't really matter. Being informed on what's happening as this is evolving so rapidly and impacting all of our sectors and all of our lives so quickly. Um, it's something that you know you can do yourself personally, and that your nonprofit uh can do too.

Carolyn Woodard

And if you're listening to this podcast, I'm gonna uh accept that that's why you're listening is to get smarter, faster, and together.

Carolyn Woodard

I want to add one more thing before I go. Um, if you want to move from listening into acting, there is this very interesting request for proposals that just came out from Longview Philanthropy. They're looking to fund organizations, individuals, and work streams working on AI power concentration, which they describe as one of the world's most important and neglected problems.

Carolyn Woodard

Their priority areas include AI oversight and government, protecting against AI-enabled mass surveillance, preventing misuse of autonomous weapons, using AI tools to empower citizens, and to examine and understand and create policies against extreme power concentration in these few tech leaders and few tech companies in the industry.

Carolyn Woodard

There's a whole outline in this request for proposals about what they're looking for. The deadline is July 2nd. I'll put the link in the show notes. If it sounds like work your organization does, if you know someone who would apply, should apply, please share it with them and you know follow the people that I mentioned as well.

Carolyn Woodard

There's just a huge conversation going on right now, clearly at this high level. And it's um I just am so excited to see it because it's really, really visible. And I hope that a lot of people, a lot of people of faith, hopefully are going to take this very seriously and and uh you know sit with it and try to understand it and try to work together along these lines. And then it just gives a great document as well for all of us to you know absorb and again, you know, maybe join forces and work together to try and uh regulate and uh you know think out our philosophy of uh how an AI can be a force for good.

Carolyn Woodard

So thank you so much for joining me. I am back here on Friday with our regular Friday podcast. I'll be back in your feed on Tuesday with the next nonprofit AI check in. And until then, take care.