2023 Awardees
Reclaiming Tech for Social Good
Each of these organizations benefited from engineering and tech support in different ways to scale their impact. You can learn more about their mission and the ways they are utilizing new technology below.
Technology dominates the S&P 500: the index’s 6 largest stocks are all technology companies at the bleeding edge of information and entertainment, computing and hardware, and digital commerce. Whether you consider the 9 months it took TikTok to grow to 100M users worldwide, or the 2 months it took ChatGPT to do the same a few years later, the scale of technological development and adoption is awe-inspiring. Yet despite such commercial success, the world of technological innovation remains, largely, a tale of two cities: well-funded big tech companies and startups deploy the most cutting-edge tools to delight customers, while nonprofit and civic institutions work with what they have and risk falling further behind.
That’s where Nonprofit ENG(INE) is challenging the status quo. In launching this program earlier this year, we believed that the gap in technology adoption between for-profit enterprises and nonprofits had less to do with desire or utility and far more with funding, talent, and technical constraints. And today, we’re excited to share updates on the program’s progress and a preview of the impact its forthcoming grant recipients are looking to make.
Meet Our 2023 Awardees
Project Goals
Podsie's mission is to empower teachers and improve student learning outcomes by providing a free, user-friendly web app that makes it easy for them to leverage research-backed strategies in the classroom.
“ Working with ENG(INE) has been transformative for Podsie. The team helped us lay a much stronger foundation for developer experience and productivity, ensuring that our development processes are efficient and scalable. They set up an infrastructure for LLM-based features, dramatically enhancing the capabilities of our platform. ENG(INE) assisted us in fleshing out our hiring processes for product designers and engineers, which led to us hiring our first full-time designer and engineer, both of whom have been wonderful additions to our team. In essence, ENG(INE) helped us evolve from a one-person, scrappy setup to a well-structured team with a much higher chance of achieving our mission.”
— Josh Ling
CEO
Podsie
Project Goals
Our mission is to unlock the great reader in every child through comprehensive, research-based, digital reading products.
“ We needed a partner with strong AI expertise in helping students match the skills they need to practice with specific texts. We were successful in creating functionality that we can put into our product in the near future. And we took a quantum leap forward toward getting students the right texts at the right time! There is demonstrable value from bringing in outside expertise. Nonprofit Eng(ine) was able to curate their partnering team from a much larger team in a way that we could not have done.”
— Rebecca Kockler,
CEO
Magpie Literacy
Project Goals
Trans Lifeline provides our trans peers with the connection, care, and advocacy we need and deserve. We were able to reimagine our hotline with ENG(INE) to use modern technology to develop a synchronous and asynchronous chatline that increases our overall service capacity.
“This project was desperately needed but not something we wanted to take on alone.”
— Kai Alviar Horton
Executive Director
Trans Lifeline