Wednesday, November 11, 2026

Mayor Daniel Lurie announced the Airbnb co-founder's gift, the largest single-donor gift San Francisco has ever received.

An initial $39 million goes to five projects, including India Basin Waterfront Park; the remaining $61 million will fund projects the Recreation and Park Department picks over the next year.

The money covers construction plus five years of maintenance and programming, and still needs Board of Supervisors approval.

A new impact report released Nov. 10 says the funder network has invested nearly $600 million in local news since 2023 and now counts 144 funders and 50 local chapters, which have invested at least $87.2 million in their own communities.

Eighty percent of funders have increased their investment since joining, and 45% now invest together, including a $21 million impact investment fund for local outlets.

The new effort will work with regional and national funders on collaborative funding models for Southern-led, community-driven climate and resilience work.

Alexandria H.

McBride is the founding executive director.

After this morning's pre-conference sessions and user groups in Chicago, Grantbook CEO Nikki Barrett leads a panel on five trends from the survey: technology investment, AI, digital risk, workforce capacity, and organizational strategy.

Panelists come from the Kauffman Foundation, The Chicago Community Trust, Schusterman Family Philanthropies, and the Bainum Family Foundation.

The full report goes public at an open TAG session on Dec. 9.

This afternoon's breakouts include "Configuring AI Securely: Encouraging Experimentation while Limiting Shadow AI," "Fine, We'll Make an AI Policy," and "What Does 'Good Data' Actually Look Like for Nonprofits?" Thursday's workshops add a funder-grantee AI governance framework, a data cleanup lab, and a hands-on incident response tabletop for grantmakers.

At bbcon London, Blackbaud introduced a Data Health Agent that flags data issues and suggests fixes through review-and-approve steps (early access in the U.S. now), plus Platform for Good, a shared layer connecting its data, workflows, and AI.

It also previewed Lantern, a fundraising-specific language model built with Databricks that will start powering select features in 2027.

In Australia, SurePact launched GrantEssentials for grant recipients, which reads a funding agreement and turns every obligation and reporting date into tasks.

In the U.K., Grantary went live with a single record that funders and grantees both work in, with organization details checked daily against official registers and a person recording the reason for every funding decision (Grantary on LinkedIn).

Issimo Consultancy made Issimo Accord generally available, adding AI document analysis and charity due diligence inside existing Salesforce grant workflows while leaving the decision with staff.

A new national RFP will fund one implementation-ready AI solution over two years, in areas such as care coordination, behavioral health, workforce support, and rural access.

The foundation says the AI should support, not replace, human judgment and oversight.

Multilingual by Design, backed by the Bezos Family, Gates, Hewlett, and Robertson foundations, Gary Community Ventures, and Sobrato Philanthropies, gave three teams $350,000 each from more than 180 applicants.

Pilots run under data-sharing agreements with partner schools, and a technical assistance partner will measure every team against a common set of measures.

The Digital Public Goods Alliance released the Open Source Policy Builder, a 21-question, roughly 12-minute self-assessment across policy, governance, technical capacity, procurement, financing, and community collaboration.

Results rate an institution as Starter, Builder, or Pioneer and come as a downloadable PDF; funders backing digital public goods can use the same frame to judge grantee readiness.

First public 2026 State of Philanthropy Tech findings.

The conference runs through Nov. 13.

A Candid webinar.

Virtual sessions, live or on demand.

A free Council on Foundations session.

Grants of $500K to $2M for AI in city services.

A Candid webinar that includes a prompt library.

Open to all.

An NTEN community call.

With TAG sessions today on shadow AI and writing an AI policy, it helps to know that AI governance is usually three different documents, not one.

Rachel Kimber of Full Circle Impact Solutions laid out this model on the Inside Impact podcast, and it maps onto how most grant teams already work.

All three rest on clean, well-governed data: a tool rule that bans sensitive data only works if you know which fields are sensitive.

The organization's overall stance: why and whether you use AI, the values it must respect, and who is accountable.

Usually short and board- or leadership-approved.

The practical rules: which tools are approved, what data can and cannot go into them (for example, no grantee financials in free personal accounts), and who can do what.

Best set by a cross-department group, including grants, IT, and legal.

Written by staff closest to the work: exactly which steps are automated (say, summarizing reports or drafting decline letters) and where a human signs off.

These change often and should.

Check whether you have a policy, an approved-tools and data list, and written practice notes, and name an owner for each gap.

TAG's shadow-AI and AI-policy sessions this week are a good prompt.

A vendor now ships an agent that flags bad records for human approval; you can copy the idea with a weekly saved report of missing or duplicate grantee fields.

Collaborative funds are getting bigger (Press Forward, Multilingual by Design).

Agree early on shared measures, data-sharing terms, and who holds the record, the same design question the new shared funder-grantee platforms are trying to solve.