From Skepticism to Scale: Lessons from Friendship Bench with Dr. Dixon Chibanda

What does it actually take to deploy AI chatbots safely in humanitarian response? Liz Devine, Head of the Program Technical Team at GOAL Global, joins Amie Vaccaro, Jonathan Jackson, and Dimagi's Erin Quinn to share hard-won lessons from building a multichannel chatbot during an mpox outbreak in Sierra Leone — and adapting it for cholera response in South Sudan. With over a decade in the humanitarian sector, from South Sudan to the Syria and Ukraine responses, Liz brings a rare ground-level perspective on innovating with vulnerable populations. She explains why an emergency is the worst time to build new tech, why keeping a human in the loop at key decision points is non-negotiable, and how referral pathways and safeguards keep sensitive cases from slipping through the cracks. She also offers practical advice on securing donor funding for experimental pilots despite shrinking budgets — starting with clearly defining the problem you're solving. As Liz puts it, AI can do the recommending, but people must make the decisions. A candid, practical conversation for anyone wanting to cut through the AI hype. Related Resources: GOAL Global – Irish humanitarian organization working in 13+ countries on health, nutrition, food security, and climate resilience. Twilio – Communications API used to relay and anonymize chatbot messages in GOAL's deployment. monday.com for Nonprofits – Work platform GOAL uses (via free humanitarian licenses) for reporting and analysis of chatbot data. WhatsApp Business Platform – The community-facing channel for GOAL's multichannel chatbot, supporting text, voice, and images. CommCare by Dimagi – Dimagi's leading open-source platform for frontline workers, and a tool GOAL uses.

Effective grantmaking is now the real bottleneck in philanthropy, says Joey Savoie, founder of Elevate Philanthropy and co-founder of Ambitious Impact, the charity incubator behind more than 65 new organizations. After years of scarcity, a wave of new tech wealth has flipped the question for many NGOs from surviving budget cuts to what they would do with double. In this one-on-one conversation with Dimagi CEO Jonathan Jackson, Joey explains why the hardest part isn't the money, but finding people who know how to give it away well. He shares why the most honest charities often get penalized for their honesty, why your fundraising ability is your comms skill multiplied by how good your organization actually is, and why, when a whole field of NGOs starts behaving strangely, you should look at the funders. Joey also makes the case for more philanthropic funds alongside foundations, a clearer path for training the next generation of grant makers, and smarter grant application processes that cut redundant work. Whether you're writing grant applications or deciding where a suddenly bigger budget should go, this episode offers practical advice from both sides of the table.

Justin Steele gave away nearly $700 million leading Google.org’s philanthropy across the Americas, and he watched funding flow to the nonprofits closest to power rather than those closest to the problem. Now the founder of Kindora, a public benefit corporation using AI to help nonprofits find funders who’d actually say yes, he calls this the legibility trap. In conversation with Dimagi CEO Jonathan Jackson, Justin takes listeners inside a grant maker’s head: how a seven-person team ran a $150 million annual budget, why portfolios so often follow personal networks, and why honest feedback is so rare. They debate whether an LLM tuned on community wisdom could read a grant application more fairly than a program officer, why AI works best as a “junior staff member’s first read,” and why “not a fit” and “not competitive” are very different no’s. Justin also shares his bet on democratizing ownership of Kindora itself through a community crowd raise. Whether you’re fundraising, grant making, or building something mission-driven, you’ll come away with a sharper sense of how capital actually moves, and how it could move better.

What happens when AI philanthropy actually arrives? Jack Lewars advises donors giving up to nine figures a year — and he argues the wave of wealth expected from AI company IPOs is more locked in than skeptics think, with potentially $130 billion or more committed to charity even in conservative scenarios. In this conversation with hosts Amie Vaccaro and Jonathan Jackson, Jack explains why concentration is the real risk ("two big funders beat one twice the size"), why the bottleneck to scaling global health organizations isn't money but managing directors and chiefs of staff, and why he has no patience for scaling plans that end in “…government adoption." Drawing on his experience running One for the World and building a mid-stage global health fund — the "Series A" of the sector — Jack lays out exactly what implementing organizations should do now to position themselves: be cost-effective, be evidence-backed, be visible to intermediaries like GiveWell and Coefficient Giving. And whatever you do, don't send a cold email.

Disability inclusion in global development starts with a question most teams never ask: who is your technology quietly leaving out? Dr. Victor Santiago Pineda, executive director of Berkeley's Center for Independent Living, president of the global inclusion nonprofit World Enabled, and one of the youngest delegates to help draft the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, joins Amie Vaccaro and guest co-host Erin Quinn for a conversation that moves from a Caracas classroom, where his mother was told her son could never be educated, to the floor of the United Nations, to the frontier of artificial intelligence. Dr. Pineda explains why the assistive technology of today becomes the mainstream technology of tomorrow, why AI trained on averages risks erasing the people at the edges of the bell curve, and what implementers and funders can do differently starting tomorrow: hire disabled technologists, build to WCAG AA, optimize for screen readers, demand accessibility through procurement. Underneath it all is his central claim — we already have enough knowledge to unlock human potential. What's missing isn't know-how. It's the collective decision to use it. Related Resources: Podcast hosted by Dr. Victor Pineda: The Independent: Meeting the Moment for Disability Justice available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube The Center for Independent Living (CIL), Berkeley – The world's first independent living center, founded in 1972 and now led by Dr. Pineda; the origin point for many principles later written into the UN CRPD. Pineda Foundation / World Enabled – Dr. Pineda's global nonprofit advancing inclusive urban development, digital equity, and disability rights worldwide. UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) – The treaty Dr. Pineda helped draft, setting out the rights and dignity of over a billion people with disabilities. Being Heumann (Apple Original Films) – Siân Heder's film of Judy Heumann's memoir and the 26-day 1977 Section 504 sit-in; TIFF opening night, in theaters November 6 and on Apple TV November 13, 2026. Protect Section 504 (DREDF) – Tracks the multi-state lawsuit challenging Section 504 regulations that Dr. Pineda references, with advocacy tools. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) – The W3C standard Dr. Pineda urges teams to build to at Level AA or higher. Positive AI Labs – Nonprofit building open datasets and evaluations to steer frontier AI toward pluralistic knowledge of human flourishing, cited by Dr. Pineda as an example of getting wisdom traditions into models before the training loop closes.