Tech and AI

Recidiviz is a nonprofit that transforms how city and state criminal justice agencies use data and technology to reduce incarceration.

A grant from Robin Hood is supporting Recidiviz’s partnership with the NYC Department of Correction to pilot an AI-enabled case planning tool that integrates pre- and post-release services — closing a persistent gap in reentry infrastructure and helping people return home from jail faster while reducing recidivism. Learn more about our grantees. 

Nonprofits across New York know AI matters, but many don’t know where to start, mostly because they don’t have tech expertise in-house. The Tech:NYC Foundation’s Decoded Futures is closing that gap by pairing nonprofit teams with experienced technologists, including volunteers from companies like OpenAI and IBM.

With a grant from the Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund, Decoded Futures will bring that support to 600 more NYC nonprofits. It will also expand its alumni community of practice and share what it learns with the field, building toward a citywide model in a sector of more than 40,000 nonprofits.

Early results are promising. Decoded Futures has supported 220 NYC nonprofits, nearly double its original goal of 115, in building more than 200 AI-enabled prototypes. The share of participants who rate their AI familiarity as high jumped from 17.5% to 74.2%, and 95% of alumni are still using what they built.

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When someone facing eviction calls a legal helpline, speed and trust both matter. The Legal Aid Society (LAS) is using AI to deliver both. Its Housing Helpline Information Retrieval Tool gives attorneys and paralegals vetted information in seconds, so they can spend less time searching and more time listening to the person on the line.

With a $1 million award as one of three winners of Robin Hood’s AI Poverty Challenge, LAS will expand and refine the tool, which was developed with Columbia University and runs in a closed, secure system built only on vetted materials. The funding will also scale the underlying AI infrastructure to cover legal needs beyond housing, and LAS plans to bring similar retrieval tools to seven other hotlines and intake processes.

The need is significant. In 2023, LAS responded to more than 31,000 helpline calls organization-wide, and its Housing Justice Helpline alone supported clients in nearly 17,000 calls. Faster responses mean more New Yorkers get help and are more satisfied with it, with a person still making every call. The same expertise will strengthen LAS’s ability to drive systemic change through informed advocacy and policy reform.

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AI literacy is becoming as essential as reading and math for student success — but without computational thinking skills, both teachers and students struggle with the underlying mechanics of AI tools, no matter how good the AI platform is. Playlab.ai, a national nonprofit that has already trained more than 2,000 NYC educators, is closing that gap: building computational thinking directly into its AI literacy platform and educator trainings, rather than treating the two as separate subjects.

With a grant from the Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund, Playlab will train 300 NYC eighth-grade teachers and reach 6,000 NYC middle schoolers with at least 25 hours of combined computational thinking and AI instruction — plugging a critical gap at the middle school level, where only 37% of NYC schools currently offer computer science exposure, compared to roughly half of elementary schools and 61% of high schools.

Early results are promising: in one pilot classroom, students using a Playlab AI tool for math nearly doubled their accuracy on problem sets compared to students without it.

Learn more about our grantees