IBM Impact Accelerator - AI for Transformative Education and Workforce Development (Discontinued)

The STEM Next AI Innovation Challenge, run by the STEM Next Opportunity Fund with the Panasonic Foundation, awards prizes of 1,000 to 5,000 US dollars to out-of-school-time programs whose high school youth teams use AI to research a local or global issue, explore ideas and strengthen a proposed solution. Ten prizes are available: two first-place awards of 5,000 dollars, three second-place awards of 3,000 dollars and five third-place awards of 1,000 dollars, paid to the program site rather than to students. Each team submits an AI Research and Development Snapshot of up to eleven slides on the provided template and a youth-created pitch video of up to five minutes; AI may assist with scripting or captions but cannot generate the whole video or a synthetic presenter. Teams must show at least one test, feedback or iteration step, though a finished prototype is not required and no prior AI or coding experience is needed. Judging is scored out of 100, weighted toward Innovation and Impact (30) and AI Collaboration and Strategy (30), with Career Connected Learning Alignment and Presentation at 20 each. Sites may enter up to five teams but can win only one prize, the adult educator who submits must complete a survey, and prize funds cannot be used for lobbying. Programs sign up to receive a toolkit, and entries close on 19 November 2026 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern.

Mozilla Foundation's Human-Scale AI call funds bespoke, fit-for-purpose AI technology designed at the scale of the problem it is meant to solve, as an alternative to resource-hungry, centralized AI. Priorities include lower resource use, privacy and decentralized power. Projects must already be deployed with their users, even if only at small scale or as an early pilot, and must have a charitable purpose. Selected projects receive $300,000 and 12 months of support starting April 2027. Strong projects may receive up to $200,000 more over two additional years, for a potential maximum of $500,000. The call is open globally, applications must be in English, and the deadline is November 20, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. PST.

Cities Deliver is a 50 million US dollar joint open call from The Rockefeller Foundation and the OpenAI Foundation, administered through RF Catalytic Capital, funding deployments of frontier artificial intelligence that measurably improve the delivery of public services in cities. Individual grants run from 500,000 to 2,000,000 US dollars over a 24-month period, with half the award disbursed upfront and the remaining half released on achievement of documented mid-term milestones, a structure that favours applicants who can specify verifiable service-delivery metrics at proposal stage. The call names four priority domains: public health, economic mobility, environmental resilience and civic engagement. Two eligibility conditions do most of the screening work and should be addressed before investing effort in an application. First, the lead applicant must be a nonprofit, which the funders define broadly to include university labs and fiscally sponsored organisations, or a public benefit corporation; ordinary for-profit companies cannot lead. Second, the proposal must carry a committed city government partner, meaning a municipal counterparty that has agreed in writing to host or adopt the work rather than merely endorse it, which makes early municipal relationship-building the critical path for most teams. Projects must also contain a meaningful frontier AI component rather than conventional analytics, and voting and election-related projects are explicitly excluded from scope. The call is global. The initial application deadline is 29 November 2026, with the window for submitting clarifying questions to the programme team closing earlier on 31 October 2026.

Cities Deliver is a $50 million global grant program from The Rockefeller Foundation and the OpenAI Foundation, managed by RF Catalytic Capital. It funds nonprofit and civil society organizations that partner with city governments to improve public services with frontier AI. Grants range from $500,000 to $2 million. Projects must focus on public health, economic mobility, environmental resilience or civic engagement. Every project needs an eligible lead organization, a committed city government partner, a charitable purpose and a meaningful frontier AI component. Applicants may use any AI model or product, and OpenAI technology gets no preference. Projects about voting or elections are excluded. Applications opened October 14, 2026 and close November 29, 2026.

Cities Deliver: AI Solutions for Public Services is a $50 million initiative from The Rockefeller Foundation and the OpenAI Foundation, managed by RF Catalytic Capital. It funds organisations that work with city governments to use artificial intelligence to improve access to public services and their quality. There are four focus areas: public health, economic mobility, environmental resilience, and civic engagement. Civic engagement excludes projects related to voting or elections. Grants range from $500,000 to $2 million over 24 months. Projects must have a charitable purpose that benefits underserved, poor, or distressed communities or social welfare. Each applicant needs a city government partner committed to the project, but governments cannot apply directly. The call opened on 14 October 2026. Applicants create a portal account and submit an eligibility screening, a Round 1 proposal, and a short video by 29 November 2026 at 11:59 PM ET. Questions go to citiesdeliver@rockfound.org by 31 October 2026, and FAQ updates are expected by 4 November 2026.

Cities Deliver is a $50 million partnership between The Rockefeller Foundation and the OpenAI Foundation to help city governments improve public services with AI, with a goal of reaching up to 100 million city residents worldwide. It awards grants of $500,000 to $2 million to organizations that work with city governments on AI-driven public services in public health, economic mobility, environmental resilience and civic engagement, with a focus on vulnerable and underserved communities. Projects should reach their goals within a 24-month grant period; follow-on funding is not guaranteed. A signed letter from a partner city government is part of the application. Applications opened October 14 and close November 29, 2026; applicants will be notified in April 2027. The program is managed by RF Catalytic Capital (contact: citiesdeliver@rockfound.org).

Cities Deliver is a $50 million global open call from the Rockefeller Foundation and the OpenAI Foundation, managed by RF Catalytic Capital, to help cities improve public services with frontier AI. Grants range from $500,000 to $2 million over 24 months. Seed grants below $1 million fund prototypes and first city pilots, and scale grants of $1 million to $2 million expand solutions that have already shown results. Projects must be led by an eligible nonprofit or civil society institution, include a committed city government partner, serve a charitable purpose and include a meaningful frontier AI component. Focus areas are public health (including disability services and food access), economic mobility (benefits enrollment, career navigation, skills-based hiring), environmental resilience (emergency services, grid infrastructure, land management) and civic engagement (digital access, courts, permitting). Voting and election projects are excluded. Applicants may use any AI model, with no preference for OpenAI technology, and matching funds are not required. Applications opened 14 October 2026 and close 29 November 2026 at 11:59pm Eastern through citiesdeliver.rockefellerfoundation.org. The initiative aims to reach up to 100 million city residents worldwide.

Utilizing the Full Power of Empire AI 2027 is a 6,000,000 US dollar Simons Foundation request for applications funding two-year research programmes that build and use foundational machine learning models on the multinode GPU clusters of New York State's Empire AI infrastructure. The Foundation expects to select six to twelve proposals, which implies a working per-award range of roughly 500,000 to 1,000,000 US dollars; the amounts recorded here are derived from that pool and award count rather than from a published per-award cap, because the RFA explicitly states there is no maximum budget total for an individual award. Applicants should therefore size budgets to the science rather than to a ceiling. The scientific scope is deliberately restricted to computational problems of fundamental importance in astrophysics, biology, mathematics, neuroscience and physical chemistry, and proposals must genuinely require multinode GPU capacity, so work that would run on a single node is a poor fit. Eligibility is the binding constraint: the principal investigator must hold a tenure-track or tenured faculty position at one of nine named Empire AI consortium institutions, namely Columbia, Cornell, CUNY, SUNY, RPI, NYU, the University of Rochester, RIT or the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Additional principal investigators may join from non-consortium institutions through subcontract. All applicants and collaborators must hold a PhD, MD or equivalent, there are no citizenship requirements, Simons Foundation and Flatiron Institute W-2 employees are excluded, and the Foundation does not fund institutions in China or Hong Kong. The award period runs 1 June 2027 to 31 May 2029 and applications close at 12 p.m. Eastern on 1 December 2026.

The Institute for Humane Studies is funding academic research on how artificial intelligence affects work over the long term. Topics include employment and labor markets, productivity, occupational change, economic opportunity and innovation. Interdisciplinary proposals are especially welcome. Deliverables can be peer-reviewed publications, policy white papers, or shareable research databases. Awards are up to $20,000, and larger awards may be considered for exceptional projects. Funds can cover conference travel with a scheduled presentation, archival research travel, research assistants, datasets and LLM subscriptions, journal submission fees, and book publication or manuscript preparation costs. Funds cannot cover living expenses, hardware, retroactive costs or institutional overhead. Proposals are due December 15, 2026, and decisions will be announced January 15, 2027.

The Institute for Humane Studies' AI and the Workforce request for proposals funds faculty research on how AI affects employment, productivity, occupational change, economic opportunity and innovation over time. Interdisciplinary proposals are especially welcome. Awards are up to $20,000, and larger awards may be considered for exceptional projects. Deliverables can include peer-reviewed publications, policy white papers or shareable research databases. Eligible costs include conference and archival travel, research assistants, dataset purchases, LLM subscriptions, journal submission fees and book publication costs. Living expenses, hardware, retroactive costs, conference travel without a presentation and institutional overhead are not covered. Applications are submitted through an online form on the IHS site and are due 15 December 2026, with decisions expected by 15 January 2027. The grant suits economists, sociologists, legal scholars and other faculty studying the labour market effects of AI.