Community IT Innovators Nonprofit Technology Topics

Nonprofit AI: RAISE US, Citizen Advocacy Tools You Can Use

• Community IT Innovators • Season 7 • Episode 48

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 26:15

If last week's episode left you wondering what you can actually do about data center development in your community, this week's episode is the flip side. Carolyn Woodard shares a new national workforce initiative just launched last week, then digs into the tools and resources available for nonprofits and community members who want to shape how AI infrastructure gets built - before it arrives, not after.

She also closes with a look at what's happening in Europe and Africa, tying it back to an earlier episode on how where you are in the world determines the environmental footprint of your AI use, and why that makes local action matter globally.

This episode covers:

  • RAISE US, a new national nonprofit launched June 25 with bipartisan leadership from former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, has secured more than $500 million toward a $1 billion goal. Anchor partners include Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and the OpenAI Foundation. If you work in workforce development in Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, or Utah, pay attention now, pilots are beginning.
  • The Virginia legislature just wrapped its biannual budget, and the data center tax break fight made it in. Legislators kept the existing break but imposed a new tax on large data center companies to offset it with more to come next session. A local example of the policy battle playing out in real time, and ways that citizen involvement makes a difference in statewide policy.
  • The Erin Brockovich Data Center Reporting Project lets citizens report data center problems - energy, noise, water - but also has a "Communities Making a Difference" map that documents real wins. Community organizing is working.
  • 41 mayors from six continents — representing more than 90 million people — signed the Global Urban Data Centres Pact at London Climate Action Week on June 23. About half the signatories are U.S. cities including Seattle, Chicago, Miami, Phoenix, and Palo Alto. They're setting common standards on clean energy, water use, and site selection, creating a benchmark for requirements for other cities and communities to use.
  • Sierra Club's 2026 Data Center Policy Guidance and Good Jobs First's moratorium bill tracker (300+ bills across 30+ states) give you concrete tools to find what's happening in your state and how to plug in.
  • Europe's record-breaking heat wave is straining data center cooling systems and sparking a movement toward European-owned AI infrastructure. The African Development Bank and UNDP have launched a $10 billion initiative so Africa becomes a producer of AI, not a consumer of tools built elsewhere. As Carolyn puts it: the Industrial Revolution took 30–40 years for communities to push back. We don't have to wait that long this time.

Resources Mentioned:

_______________________________
Start a conversation :)

Thanks for listening. 


Carolyn Woodard

Hello, and welcome to the Community IT Innovators Nonprofit AI Midweek Check-in. I'm Carolyn Woodard, your host. As I say every week, I'm not an AI expert. I'm very interested and curious about AI and particularly the intersection of how AI and AI tools and policy and issues, environmental issues, justice issues, ownership and power are all intersecting with the nonprofit sector, as nonprofits and society as a whole starts to use these tools more and more.

Carolyn Woodard

So every week I try to bring you a couple of news stories and some developments and things that you can think about as you also are thinking about your AI journey. If you're looking for uh tips on using AI tools, you can go to our website, communityit.com. We have a whole bunch of webinars and blog posts and podcasts there about different aspects of how to use AI tools.

Carolyn Woodard

If you're looking for an introduction to what is AI, you can go back in this podcast to when we started in January. So we have a lot of information on it. We're trying to all get smarter together.

Carolyn Woodard

And I said many times, but I keep seeing it and I keep thinking it is that whatever decisions you want to make about AI, really just hope that you make them from an informed position. So educating yourself as much as you can, getting a lot of AI literacy and thinking about the policy. We're the nonprofit sector, so we think about policy a lot. And we don't ever assume that something that we use has no consequences or doesn't come from a long line of systemic issues. So as that all is adding to the context as you're thinking about AI, I just hope that this also can serve as a resource of uh things I'm looking at, news that I'm tracking, and just trying to curate it so that the huge fire hose of AI information, uh, we're just going to focus on nonprofits.

Carolyn Woodard

So last week we talked about data center developers uh showing up in my local community with large grants that uh hinged on um the data center being approved to build in the place that they wanted to build and in the way that they wanted to build it. And those grants that they were offering, if you missed last week, um you can go back and check the show notes. Uh, the story is evolving, but it was $10 million for this community. They had identified 10 nonprofits that would get a million-dollar grant each. And for some of those nonprofits, that was way more than their operating budget. And it was a one-time grant distributed in one year. And as I said, it was uh contingent upon the data center going in to become a neighbor, and they called it their good neighbor grants. So, interesting story uh that's being replicated in other communities around the country, probably around the world. Um, and

Carolyn Woodard

I wanted to kind of look at the flip side of that. Um, what can you do if you want data center development in your community to go differently? So, we're going to give you some resources today, plus a news item on a new national workforce initiative that has come out recently, and I'll look at what communities around the world are doing around, you know, as they're looking at a future with AI, what does that look like and what do they want it to look like?

Carolyn Woodard

All right, so this is uh kind of breaking news last week on Wednesday. A new national nonprofit was announced called RAISE US. I don't know if that's RAISE US. Uh, it is led by uh former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb. So they're that's a bipartisan group that is uh heading it up intentionally, and their framing is that there's a technology strategy in place to win the AI race, but it doesn't have, we don't have a people strategy. So

Carolyn Woodard

RAISE US is trying to put in place workforce development strategies. Uh, they have secured more than 500 million toward a 1 billion target with anchor partners in commerce, including Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and the Open AI Foundation. So those are competitors that are getting together as a you know cabinet, a board to uh put in place this nonprofit that will work on workforce development. There's also Bank of America, IBM, MasterCard, Workday, and the Rockefeller Foundation are already involved. They're calling for you know more partners to join them and put up more of the money that they're looking for. And they're gonna operate in four areas.

Carolyn Woodard

They're gonna partner with governors to reshape public workforce and education systems. So one worrying about the kids coming out of college or people trying to get a credential, change careers, uh, go back to a career after taking time off, non-traditional students. Uh, and they're going to help those uh institutions upgrade how they're using AI and how they are training the workforce around AI.

Carolyn Woodard

They're gonna work with employers also on retraining and redeployment rather than layoffs. I think they see the writing on the wall of if you have uh difficulty if you lay off a whole bunch of entry-level workers or database workers or people who are impacted by AI and their jobs, you are gonna run into problems locally.

Carolyn Woodard

They're going to build national apprenticeship pipelines in healthcare and advanced manufacturing.

Carolyn Woodard

And also they are going to run a policy lab funded separately from corporate contributions to develop and test approaches for workers managing career transitions as AI disrupts uh workforces.

Carolyn Woodard

They are measuring success by whether workers land and keep good jobs, not by enrollment, not by the amount of money they spent on these workforce programs, but they really are trying to capture does this make a difference? Um, and I don't know how deep into those KPIs, if they're gonna be able to track if someone lost their job to AI and then through participation in one of these programs, we're able to get a new different job.

Carolyn Woodard

So for nonprofits specifically, this news item, uh those in the initial state partnerships are in four states: Arkansas, Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah. So if you are in workforce development in one of those four states, pay attention. I mean, you've probably already heard about this, but have a look. They're starting their pilots if you work in education, community colleges, uh, other education that's coming at you. And of course, with the workforce and the partnerships as well with uh employers.

Carolyn Woodard

So if you're in a different state uh outside of those four, um I would say keep watching though, because I do uh imagine that this is a model that's designed to scale nationally. They want it to get it national as soon as possible. And I don't expect it to take long before it does become national because this is going to be a problem with workforce uh everywhere. So I will share the uh website with you in the show notes, and uh you can see the announcements about other press releases. So pretty interesting.

Carolyn Woodard

It feels like every other week or so there's a new big announcement of either a foundation doing something like the Claude Core or Microsoft uh Changemaker Elevation or a new government, you know, initiative or a different government uh or country that is taking initiative to, I guess, confront, uh, manage, uh, at least talk about the massive changes that are underway with AI. So this is another one, and uh, you know, I'm sure I'll be talking about more in the weeks to come. So

Carolyn Woodard

Last week's episode was about what data center developers are doing to influence the communities where they are hoping to build new data centers. And I want to take just a minute to say um I do hear from people, and we I get comments and uh you know responses that um there are many people who feel that it's AI that is causing the data center boom. And that is true to an extent.

Carolyn Woodard

But I would say that you know uh data centers have been around since you know YouTube started having a gajillion videos uploaded daily, and the YouTube, you know, amount of videos that are on YouTube are not is not falling, it's growing, it's continuing to grow. So if you watch something on YouTube, if you stream something on Netflix, if you use GPS in your car, you are using data centers. And they were being built ahead of this current uh boom. But yeah, it's the size and scale with which the boom is taking place right now and the kind of tricky ways that those data centers are trying to get away with, what they can get away with. And uh for that,

Carolyn Woodard

I have some breaking news this week, which is that last week I told you about a small Virginia community that was interacting with data centers. Uh, this week I can report that the Virginia legislature just completed their um biannual budget. We have a part-time legislature, and their budgets are made for two-year chunks, and they have been going back and forth over the data center tax incentive tax breaks that they give, that they started giving two years ago, and that um there's, you know, they've heard us. A lot of our representatives have heard how upset everyone is with the data center going in right next door.

Carolyn Woodard

And so there was a big fight over repealing that tax break. And what they ended up doing was they left the tax break in, but they imposed a new tax on data center companies of a certain size that is meant to offset the tax breaks that they have been giving. So they're gonna come back next year, certainly with more uh work on that tax break to try and get rid of that, because there's no reason that these super profitable companies uh can only build if they get this tax break and the amount of taxes that could be going to Virginia to help with things like electricity grid strengthening and electricity fees and water fees.

Carolyn Woodard

And zoning assistance to you know the elected officials locally that are on your zoning board, that are a lot of them are volunteers and just very local. And this is really difficult to deal with uh the amount of money that's coming in and the sophistication, I guess I would say, of the lobbyists that these data centers uh hire to argue in front of uh local representatives.

Carolyn Woodard

So, on that note, I wanted to give you a resource from Erin Brockovich, if you remember the film or the book. Uh, what she is doing now is environmental justice work still. She's still working on water issues, and she has turned her attention to data centers. Her team has built a website that is a community reporting project. It's at BrockovichDataCenter.com, which I will share in the show notes with you also.

Carolyn Woodard

This site lets residents submit reports about data center impacts in their communities: noise, electricity, water use, construction, pollution, community impacts, uh, community displacements. And uh, so you can go there and you can complain, basically.

Carolyn Woodard

But what I wanted to point out to you about this website is that there's a portion of it called Communities Making a Difference, which is a map of victories. So projects that were rejected by planning boards, moratoriums that were passed by city council, ballot measures that were won by voters, I places that the um, you know, community-based agreements were put in place, like our story last week about Lancaster.

Carolyn Woodard

And some recent examples from the Brockovich map is Orange County, North Carolina, voted six to one for a one-year pause on a large data center. Baltimore City Council has passed a one-year moratorium. Hill County, Texas, the first county in Texas to do this, also voted for a one-year moratorium. Uh, there was a 300-acre proposed development, and the residents raised their concerns and they are putting the moratorium on for a year. Everybody get their act together. Um, Charlotte also has enacted a 150-day pause.

Carolyn Woodard

So you can look at that website and see the map of the different victories. So, again, just going back to the idea that we have agency. Um, and

Carolyn Woodard

If you are really concerned about the impact that AI is having on our society and our country and our planet, then the thing to do is not, I mean, you can boycott AI. That's a perfectly reasonable response. But please, in addition to boycotting it yourself, which has an infinitesimally small impact on these companies and these gazillionaires, um, also go turn out at your local planning meeting, um, talk to your elected representatives. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

Don't be stuck with uh maybe thinking this is a partisan issue. It's a very nonpartisan issue. Everybody's upset. So join in the fight. And um I will, again, I will share those resources to the Brockovich Data Center Reporting Project in the show notes. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

It's not just individual communities. There is a movement of mayors organizing. Uh, it was announced at London Climate Action Week. 41 mayors from six continents representing more than 90 million people, uh, announced a global urban data centers pact, which is a coordinated effort to set common standards on the data centers.

Carolyn Woodard

So, requirements that they would have to use clean energy, limit their water use, um, you know, build their water use in ways that were as, you know, as low impact as possible the communities where they're going in, their site selection, there would be requirements around that.

Carolyn Woodard

And this is uh this kind of joint effort in these different countries with all different kinds of zoning and planning laws, but trying to set down some standards and setting that out, of course, um, means that then your community would have a benchmark, a kind of guideline to go to and insist on those same standards where you are too.

Carolyn Woodard

One of the things they want to require is that you have to show a community benefit before the data center is in place, not after you have built the data centers. Now you use some of the profit from those AI companies to do community like reconstruction afterwards with these community grants that we talked about last week from the big players. So really interesting. Um,

Carolyn Woodard

Half of the signatories to this pact are U.S. cities. Some of those include Seattle, Chicago, Miami, Phoenix, and Palo Alto. Um, the Phoenix mayor had a quote that was included in their um, you know, announcement that they understand the importance of innovation. It does create jobs in our community. We just want to make sure that we get it right for our local residents and for the health of our planet. So um,

Carolyn Woodard

This was organized through C40 Cities, which is a global network of 100 cities working on climate action. So I'm gonna link to their announcement in the show notes and you can follow along. If you are living in one of those cities, um, you know, go ahead and you know, share these resources locally and um, you know, give flowers to your mayors for joining up to this because collective action, like I said, you personally doing a boycott or a boycott has a very, very small impact on these giant corporations. But collective action has always been where you have more leverage. So little kudos there to those uh mayors and you know, another way that you can get involved.

Carolyn Woodard

Now, for some advocacy tools, if you're wondering about uh all the time that you spend at work or with your family, when do you have extra time to do any of this advocacy and lobbying? Um, not surprisingly, Sierra Club has released a data center policy guidance for 2026, specifically for local lawmakers, regulators, and advocates. They have state-by-state organizing underway.

Carolyn Woodard

They have community toolkits, sample municipal ordinances, information on how to show up at public hearings. So you can look for your local state chapter of Sierra Club and look for more resources there.

Carolyn Woodard

I will reshare also the resource that I shared about those community-based agreements that was used in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. So you can also find some information on that type of approach that you could share with your elected officials and with your local advocacy groups.

Carolyn Woodard

There is also an organization called Good Jobs First, which is tracking all of the moratorium bills that have been filed in this legislative cycle. There are over 300 data center bills across more than 30 states. So you can have a look at that resource as well to see if there are local ordinances or statewide moratoriums that you could get behind to put a pause on this out-of-control development and put some of these regulations in place that then those companies would have to comply with.

Carolyn Woodard

We did talk earlier about where you are matters in how dirty this industry is and the impact that it's having on you and on the planet. Europe is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. Uh, the United States is as well in Washington, DC for the Fourth of July celebration. They're planning to see, I think the heat index is going to be well over 100 degrees. So they're already publishing, you know, how to stay safe in an extreme heat situation. So everyone out there be careful.

Carolyn Woodard

But while residents are and tourists are dealing with extreme temperatures, you know, that also puts data centers under stress because cooling is about 40% of the data centers' energy use. As you can imagine, when there is hot, extreme, hot weather outside, that uh the power spike on the grid is difficult and dangerous to manage. And the data centers are also trying to spike to keep their facilities cool.

Carolyn Woodard

So, Europe at the moment, of course, has already been asking. They've been doing what they can to strengthen their electricity grid, but um they have a lot of questions about where the AI infrastructure gets built and who controls it. There is a movement to develop European-owned AI, not just regulate American platforms and American companies that are going in there, but actually to develop sovereign infrastructure and sovereign, you know, large language models that they would be locally owned, right? That's something that they're looking at kind of wresting that away from the big six companies that are working in AI right now. Uh,

Carolyn Woodard

And it's not just in Europe. So the African Development Bank and UNDP launched a 10 billion initiative so that Africa can become a producer of AI, not a consumer of tools that were all built elsewhere using or not using African uh local languages, African practices, African values. And so there's a consortium of African leaders talking about data sovereignty, which we've mentioned here before.

Carolyn Woodard

It's a growing movement. Uh, philanthropy is very aware of this, who owns the data and how extractive is it to get that data from the communities that we care about and work with, um, you know, all the way from nature to indigenous communities to, you know, local communities to languages to culture, all of that being um, you know, scraped and appropriated into these large language models and uh sometimes by the uh commercial companies that we're using, um, definitely not with any consent, and definitely not with any of us getting any of the royalties,

Carolyn Woodard

Which we talked a couple weeks ago about, um, the idea to create this uh sovereign fund for AI that we, the people worldwide, would share in the uh economic profits of the language that was extracted from us.

Carolyn Woodard

I also just wanted to do a call back to we talked earlier about where you are in the world making such a big difference in the environmental footprint of your AI use. So if you remember, I said that Iceland's grid is very clean and very resilient. India's is not. So doing a prompt, the same prompt in Iceland versus India, you know, it has a huge difference in impact on the environment.

Carolyn Woodard

I've heard the AI boom compared to the Industrial Revolution, and it it I think it is a metaphor that works if you consider that it took a long time for anti-pollution, anti-corruption, you know, justice, workforce developments, um, the progressive era basically was a result, you know, 30, 40 years later, after the in the industrial revolution had made things so you know dirty and dysfunctional and polluted so many places without the consent of the people who lived there to come in and try to clean up afterwards. So I do think that we are seeing something similar now, but hopefully we can get ahead of that game and not realize too late uh what is happening to our communities.

Carolyn Woodard

It's true for you know my little county in Virginia, it's true, you know, in Africa, in Europe, in uh in Asia.

Carolyn Woodard

So I will share all of these with you in the show notes, the different URLs. You can go check this out yourself. If you're concerned about data centers and what unchecked AI infrastructure means for your community, you have a lot of tools.

Carolyn Woodard

It does take effort, right? It's not something that you can just sit back and hope that someone does something about it. And I think it's heartening that I think about the Virginia legislature's decision on their budget, and I think about our local planning board meetings that have just become overflowing with citizens who want citizen time to talk out against the data centers. You know, it's pretty easy to get involved.

Carolyn Woodard

And uh if you are concerned about your nonprofit or you yourself using the AI tools and how much that prompt is destroying the planet, uh definitely you have a lot more agency and a lot more impact when you show up at planning and zoning meetings. You can work with your Sierra Club chapter, look up what's going on in your state legislature, you know, look up the Erin Brockovich site, connect with your mayor's office, um, you know, urge your ... you elect them.

Carolyn Woodard

So um spending a little bit of time, maybe you need to budget for it, you just spend five minutes a day uh becoming educated and contributing to these different advocacy groups and showing up for these meetings. Um, those are open to the public. If you're not there, you know, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. So um show up and we are seeing it make a difference.

Carolyn Woodard

So it can seem overwhelming. It can seem like this is a giant tidal wave that's just gonna sweep everything away in its path, and the seven billionaires are gonna get, you know, trillionaires uh before the end of next year. That is one possibility, but I find it really heartening to see the people standing up and uh elected officials making changes to these policies. So

Carolyn Woodard

I will share all of those resources with you. Um I'm starting this week to do uh what I'm reading item on LinkedIn where you can follow me uh with some of the URLs and stories that didn't make it into the podcast.

Carolyn Woodard

And um we'll be in your feed on Friday with a new podcast episode about a new project around data and how nonprofits can uh take some data pledges to think about and work on these kind of data sovereignty issues as they relate to AI. I talk with a fascinating entrepreneur, Jim Fruchterman from uh Tech Matters. So that'll be on Friday. And then next Tuesday, I will be back here with some more nonprofit AI news. Until then, take care.