Strengthening the voice of civil society in debate on AI - European AI Fund grants 1.55 million Euros to 16 public interest organisations
Tech policy debates in Europe urgently need more civil society participation. To strengthen the voice of civil society in debates around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automated Decision Making (ADM), the European AI Fund is granting support to sixteen organisations to shape and influence public and policy debates.
Over the next five years the European Commission has ambitions to forge a plan for Europe’s digital transformation, including AI. But without a strong civil society taking part in the debate, Europe—and the world—risk missing opportunities to better society and instead, might choose a path paved with societal harm. The European AI Fund, a joint initiative of more than 15 foundations including the King Baudouin Foundations, aims to strengthen civil society’s capacity to contribute to these tech policy discussions.
This fund enhances civil society’s ability to take on this crucial role: to be a more visible and more effective voice in public and policy debates about the role, form and shape that Europe’s digital transformation should take.
16 grants
The objective of the AI Fund’s first open call was two-fold: to strengthen the advocacy and policy capacity of those who already work on AI/ADM, and to bring in new voices to the debate, especially those that are working on issues affected by AI/ADM, as well as organisations that work for, and represent communities that are disproportionately affected by risks and harms associated with AI/ADM.
The European AI Fund is happy announce that it will work with a cohort that represents a broad spectrum of expertise and experience. Given the urgency of this work it has increased the budget for this call from 1 million to 1.55 million Euros in total. In the next twelve to eighteen months the grants will be supporting the work of 16 organisations – please find a description of their work on the website https://europeanaifund.org/:
• Access Now Europe
• AW AlgorithmWatch
• ANEC – The European Consumer Voice in Standardisation
• ePaństwo Foundation
• European Network Against Racism (ENAR)
• European Digital Rights (EDRi)
• European Patients’ Forum
• Foxglove Legal (Foxglove)
• Friends of the Earth Europe
• GLITCH
• Health Action International (HAI)
• International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE)
• Irish Council for Civil Liberties
• Mnemonic
• Panoptykon Foundation
• Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (PICUM)
About the European AI Fund
The fund is supported by the Bosch Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Fondation Nicolas Puech, Ford Foundation, King Baudouin Foundation, Luminate, Mozilla Foundation, Oak Foundation, Open Society Foundations and Stiftung Mercator. We are a group of national, regional and international foundations working in Europe that are dedicated to using their resources—financial and otherwise—to strengthen civil society and deepen the pool of experts across Europe who have the tools, capacity and know-how to catalogue and monitor the social and political impact of AI and data driven interventions and hold them to account.
The fund’s long-term goal is to promote an ecosystem of European public interest and civil society organisations working on policy and technology, based on a diversity of actors and a plurality of goals that represents society as a whole.
The European AI Fund is hosted by the Network for European Foundations (NEF) and is based in Brussels. NEF is an association of leading European foundations, dedicated to strengthening philanthropic cooperation. NEF initiatives are open to foundations interested in joining forces in different strands of work (democracy, social inclusion, international development).