We help nonprofits, funders and social enterprises put AI to work in ways that fit their mission, their data and the people they serve.
We work with the world's leading nonprofits, funders, UN agencies, impact investors, and social enterprises.
We use AI inside our own company, build it into the products and services we deliver, and help our clients decide whether, where and how to adopt it.
We are also honest about what we don't yet know. The long-term effects of AI are uncertain, and the communities our clients serve are often the ones most exposed to its potential harms. So we hold ourselves to nine principles. They guide how we work, how we build, and the advice we give.
Our AI Center of Excellence owns these principles. It brings together more than 20 people from across Vera, with sponsorship from our leadership team. Every AI initiative inside Vera is weighed against our values and these principles before it moves forward, and what we learn from our own adoption shapes the support we give our clients.
Ethics starts with the community.
There is no single, universal rulebook for ethical AI. What counts as fair or appropriate depends on the people and places involved. So we work with our clients, and through them with the communities they serve, to make sure the AI solutions we build reflect local values and priorities rather than those of the communities where they are built.
We are open about where AI is used.
Trust is the foundation of everything a nonprofit does, and trust needs honesty. We tell you where AI is at work in our products and services. We design our solutions so that their outputs can be explained in plain language to the staff, funders and beneficiaries who depend on them.
We watch for bias and act on it.
AI learns from data, and data carries the inequities of the past. Left unchecked, that can mean a system that overlooks the very people it was meant to help. We assess the AI tools we build and recommend for fairness toward the communities they impact.
We protect the data people trust us with.
Nonprofits hold deeply personal information about donors, volunteers and the people they serve. We design solutions that are compliant with the organizational, local, and regional policies of the communities they are being built to serve. We limit the data to only what a solution needs, anonymize or encrypt sensitive data where it makes sense, and follow the privacy laws that apply, including GDPR and HIPAA. We treat privacy as a matter of respect, not just compliance.
We think about the environmental cost.
AI uses energy, sometimes a great deal of it. When we choose or recommend tools, we take that footprint into account and prefer smaller, more efficient models whenever they do the job well. Where larger foundation models are recommended and/or used in our own work we limit their use to control impact.
We think about the environmental cost.
AI uses energy, sometimes a great deal of it. When we choose or recommend tools, we take that footprint into account and prefer smaller, more efficient models whenever they do the job well. Where larger foundation models are recommended and/or used in our own work we limit their use to control impact.
People are accountable, not the AI.
AI is never responsible for what it produces. The humans using it are. Clear ownership and governance inside Vera oversees how AI is chosen, used and reviewed across its whole lifecycle. We help our clients put the same clarity in place.
Humans stay in control.
AI should strengthen human expertise and compassion, not replace them. In everything we build, people can review, question and override what the AI suggests, and we train our teams and our clients to do that with confidence.
AI has to earn its place.
We don't add AI tools because they are new or expected. We start with the problem, make sure the data behind it is sound, and pilot small before we scale. If AI tools cannot show real value for an organization and its mission, we will say so.
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A responsible and ethical roadmap for using AI to accelerate your mission—grounded in your context, values, and data
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The AI Peer Learning Group is an open, peer-led space where social sector organizations share how they are using AI, including the parts they are still figuring out. Members include iNGOs, foundations, social enterprises, nonprofits and multilaterals, whether or not they have worked with Vera. We meet online once a month, and you don't need an AI strategy or a use case to take part.
Read more in Inside Vera's AI Peer Learning Group
Join the AI Peer Learning GroupTell us where you are with AI today, and we'll get back to you with ideas for where to start.