Semi-Annual Competitive Grants

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.