The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation has announced that it is joining with several other foundations in the creation of the European AI Fund, a pooled fund at the Network of European Foundations. 

The fund is a collaborative effort between an array of funders working on different issues to address how digital rights and technologies are impacting the efforts and roles of nonprofits. To that end, the fund will promote an ecosystem of European public interest and civil society organizations working on policy and technology, such as how AI can exacerbate and amplify existing inequalities and racial discrimination.

“We recognized that you can’t view digital rights in isolation to other social justice issues and that we as a movement also have a lot to learn from people with years of expertise about certain manifestations of unfair criminalization,” said Sarah Chander, a senior policy advisor at the European Digital Rights Network, a network of civil rights organizations, experts, advocates, and academics and one of the initial recipients of a grant from the European AI Fund. “We wanted to make sure that what we are advocating for is also representative of racial justice, migrant justice, gender justice, workers’ rights and many other points of view.”

“We’re at a critical moment where the direction of future technologies is being decided, and there’s a very loud voice coming from private industry and governments, but civil society feels a lot quieter,” said European AI Fund director Catherine Miller. “So, we want to amplify the volume of civil society’s work by supporting organizations that are already working on advocacy and policy, as well as supporting others who represent communities that are most affected by the impact of AI to engage in the conversation.” 

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