Funder's Gold

The treasure isn't found yet — but we're closer.

May 20, 2026

I have gold fever. And if you live in the Bay Area, there’s a good chance you have it too. Somewhere within the 7 mile radius of San Francisco’s city hall, a 150-pound treasure chest filled with coins is buried about a foot underground. The whole city knows it exists. No one knows exactly where it is. The internet is losing its mind.

The clues arrived the old-fashioned way: a poem posted to Reddit. Since then, friends and I have been debating the true meaning of words like “stern” and “pins” and wandering through parks with the haunted look of people who have spent too much time stuck on a riddle. Last year’s version was solved in 11 hours. This year’s has dragged on for weeks, stumping a city full of engineers and people who are absolutely convinced the answer is hidden stage-left of one very specific bench.

Here’s what strikes me about the hunt: hard problems rarely get solved by one person squinting at a clue in isolation. People are collaborating, testing theories, and generously sharing learnings on Reddit. Also of note is that tech alone is not a solution to this problem. This riddle is not something a chatbot can solve (trust me, we tried). The best breakthroughs come from combining tech-assisted analysis with human judgment and local knowledge. Like, someone who knows that “pins” means something specific in this neighborhood.

Last year, Shannon and I published “The Philanthropic Reset” with leaders at Google.org. The core argument: nonprofits are being asked to solve 21st-century problems with 20th-century tools, and philanthropy has the resources, the flexibility, and frankly the responsibility to help change that. A year later, the treasure hunt feels like the right metaphor for this moment. The tools exist, the map exists, but without the right people coordinating and putting in the work, the chest stays buried.

In the whitepaper, we issued three calls to action for funders. This month, I’m picking the paper back up to see what changed, what didn’t, and where philanthropy should dig next.

Digging In: A One-Year Progress Report

1. Future‑Proof the Nonprofit Sector Through Tech Capacity

Treat tech as a core investment, not an overhead cost

Good news first: the engineering barrier is genuinely lower than it was a year ago. AI-assisted coding means you don’t need a technical co-founder to get started anymore.

But that doesn’t mean we’ve struck gold just yet. Scaling that solution responsibly is still hard. The AI-powered nonprofits getting this right are building with and for the people they serve. That means testing in the real world and having the technical expertise and capacity to keep iterating.

In Nonprofit Quarterly, Ted Siefer profiled SameSame Collective as a model for what this looks like in practice. SameSame provides mental health support to queer youth in underserved communities. When LLMs arrived, SameSame tested AI-powered chatbots against their original service. Users rated the AI higher on experience but lower on trustworthiness and local relevance. Going back to the drawing board to get that balance right takes time, expertise, and resources. That’s exactly the kind of R&D grantmakers should be funding.

2. Engineer Radical Cross‑Sector Partnership

Build the infrastructure for the sector to work together

This is where things got genuinely exciting. Like r/San Francisco, the field is trying to coordinate rather than fragment. Thousands of grantmakers showed up to recent events like Skoll and the India AI Impact Summit to learn and partner. New philanthropic collaboratives with a specific focus on AI, like Humanity AI, Eight Point Three, and NextLadder Ventures, didn’t exist a year ago.

Ryan Rippel, who was just named to the 2026 TIME100 Philanthropy list, is leading one of those collaboratives. NextLadder is a $1B+ coalition backed by the Gates Foundation and Ballmer Group, built to move capital and AI toward solutions for Americans navigating unemployment, housing insecurity, and health challenges. Here’s why he thinks it matters:

“We are rapidly entering a world where AI touches every aspect of our lives. Collectively, we have real power to shape its trajectory. We brought together a coalition that doesn’t agree on every issue, but does recognize the opportunity in this moment. We’re making a bet that if we work across sectors with philanthropists, founders, and community leaders, we can scale practical AI tools that help families navigate economic challenges and build prosperity on their own terms.”

The infrastructure is forming. Next come the results.

3. Deploy Risk Capital Strategically Across the Nonprofit Lifecycle

Fund at every stage, not just when it’s already proven

We haven’t quite found the X yet. Funders want outcomes before they invest. AI-powered nonprofits need investment before they can produce outcomes. We saw this catch-22 a year ago. We still see it now. Running AI funding through traditional models that weren’t built for AI, like annual grant cycles and overhead caps, means great organizations slip through the cracks.

Take Adalat AI, a nonprofit using AI transcription to tackle court backlogs in India and deliver fairer, faster trials. When they applied to Fast Forward’s 2024 Accelerator, they were four months old and had raised $10K. They didn’t have any impact data. By most traditional funding criteria, they wouldn’t have made the cut. But they did have a strong solution and a smart, proximate founding team, so we took the bet. Two years later, Adalat AI has expedited over 100K cases in a country where 50M are pending. Their solution is now live in over 3K courtrooms across India.

The world can’t afford to not have more Adalat AIs in it. But we will keep missing them if we only fund what’s already proven.

We’re deep in research for the next AI for Humanity Report, and what we’re finding will sharpen these calls to action further. If you’re an AI-powered nonprofit, we’d love to hear from you. If you’re a grantmaker ready to help define what comes next, stay tuned. In the meantime — fund the tech, fund together, and fund the future.

EDIT: Fortuitous timing — the day I published this article is the day the location's been revealed! Turns out we're on the same page about what this treasure hunt's really about.

"And if you think, "There's no way I could find this from a computer. Hundreds of us would have to literally wander the Presidio and the headlands for days, trading notes, collaborating, and exploring every nook and cranny, and even that might take a month…”
Yes."

Quick Bytes

APN Opportunities and Funding News

The Microsoft Changemaker Fellowship seeks organizations ready to move from AI interest to real-world adoption. This 10-week program tackles a core organizational challenge, whether that’s securing internal systems, creating reliable funding streams, or reducing manual processes. Apply by May 22.
The Digital Promise K-12 AI Infrastructure Program funds teams building open-source AI tutoring models that work better for students. Over the next four years, the $26M program will issue grants to develop these projects. Submit LOI by May 25.
Turn.io: Health and AI Accelerator supports organizations to build and launch AI-powered chat and voice services within existing workflows. Participants unlock up to $750K in value through platform access, technical support, expert mentorship, and funding pathways. Apply by May 31.
For weekly funding updates for your AI-powered nonprofit, subscribe to Funding Forward.

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