AI Capacity Building Education · For mission-driven teams
Cohort AI training, built on the work your team already does.
AI presents new opportunities and risks, and literacy improves the ratio of those available to an organization.
Not ready to talk to anyone yet? Run the free AI Opportunity & Risk Snapshot first and bring the result to the call.
Who this is for
Best fit if…
- Some AI uses could conflict with your mission and others could further it
- Your staff are already using AI, unevenly
- Staff want to upskill, but there is no structured path yet
- Leadership wants a shared skill floor, not just a document or prompt that can go obsolete near-term
- The EU AI Act’s Article 4 applies to you
- Stakeholders have concerns about AI you want to respect, while still using it where the cost/benefit case is good
- You need an answer for your board or funder
You’ll get the most out of this if AI use has already started somewhere on your team, there’s opportunity to make staff life better and mission impact higher but security and trust risks are also recognized, and there’s a budget line it could fit (even a small one).
Groups we design training for
- Whole internal teams
- Technical teams
- Non-technical teams
- Leadership
- Role-based cohorts
- Grantee cohorts, delivered on behalf of a funder or capacity-building partner
- Small, medium, and large group sizes
Organizations starting from
- Little to no AI use yet, unsure where to begin
- Staff experimenting individually, no shared approach
- Some structure already, need to close specific gaps
- Comfortable with the basics, need help going further
Why this matters now
Upskilling your people is one of the fastest, highest-return moves available right now, because the capability frontier is moving faster than predicted and the risks are moving with it. Your own staff can now do things that until recently needed an outside expert charging serious money. And learning as a group brings back something individual tool use takes away: shared judgment, and colleagues who can check each other’s work.
AI is like an intern: surprisingly good at some tasks, surprisingly bad at others, and it takes experience with this particular kind of intern to know which is which. That experience is the thing training builds. Buying licenses doesn’t create it, and neither does a prompt list that goes stale in a month.
This isn’t just an AlignIQ argument. In 2026, ten major U.S. foundations (including MacArthur, Ford, Omidyar Network, and Mellon) pooled $500 million specifically to help civil-society organizations use AI responsibly. And organizations with a mature, org-wide AI-literacy program report significant AI returns at roughly double the rate of organizations without one. (“Significant positive ROI” on AI investments jumps from 21% to 42% if paired with AI literacy investments, while risk of “no positive ROI” drops from 17% to 11% per a survey from February 2026.)
What waiting costs
One student described a consultant who’d built their team an AI-powered knowledge management system that turned out too unreliable for the workflow it was meant for. That soured AI for much of the staff before they’d tried it for better fit tasks for them. That same staff could likely build something that works better today than what the contractor delivered back then, because the tools have improved.
Waiting doesn’t mean staying neutral. It means the decision gets made later anyway, without your own experiences-grounded read on it, by whoever’s loudest when the pressure finally arrives.
Ways to start
Topics we build a program around: AI literacy skills, beginner to advanced · AI governance (see Ethical AI Guardrails for the policy side) · research · grant writing · role-based best practices and prompts · applications specific to your situation.
Custom to your needs
Cohort training & capacity building
Ranges widely. A two-hour session on safe input habits and checking outputs. A short, engaging, audience-relevant learning. A full workshop delivered through a capacity-building partner to their own beneficiaries. Or an internal cohort on general skills, more advanced skills, a specific rollout, or higher-risk casework. Whatever the format, it’s built for a quick positive return on your people’s time.
From €500 for a single adapted session. From €4,500 for a multi-session cohort.
5 sessions
Safe, Ethical AI Essentials for Purpose-Driven Work
Five two-hour sessions on drafting, summarizing, and structuring your own workflow with the tools you already have. You leave with a red/yellow/green data rule, one upgraded workflow, a living AI agreement, and a 30-day adoption plan.
From €4,500 for the five-session programme.
In development
AI Literacy Foundations
Self-paced. Built for the EU AI Act’s Article 4 literacy obligation.
Pricing at launch.
Occasional
Webinars
EU AI Rules, co-hosted with Fanny Cornette.
Free to attend.
What it costs
Formats vary widely enough that a single number would be misleading, so here are ranges by format. Prices in EUR and exclude VAT where applicable. USD available on request. The fit call is free, and we’ll give you a firm number after it.
Single session (one to two hours)
From €500 where we adapt existing material to your audience. From €1,400 where we research your context and build the session around your workflows.
Multi-session internal cohort
From €4,500 for a five-session programme, scoped by group size and how many role- or level-based tracks you need.
Grantee cohort, delivered for a funder or partner
From €600 per enrolled participant with a minimum of 15, or from €10,000 per cohort. Scoped per cohort rather than per seat, because cohort size, how spread out the grantees are, and how much tailoring each one needs move the number more than headcount does.
AI Literacy Foundations (self-paced)
Pricing announced at launch. Tell us on the fit call if you want to be told when it opens.
What shifts the number: group size, how many role- or level-based tracks you need, how much we tailor to your specific workflows, and whether you want the Article 4 evidence pack. Smaller nonprofits and grant-funded teams may qualify for community-rate options where capacity allows. When budget is tight the container gets smaller, not lower-quality: fewer sessions, fewer tracks, lighter documentation.
Need to make the case internally first? The free AI Opportunity & Risk Snapshot takes about seven minutes and gives you two scores plus the moves worth making, in a form you can forward to leadership. No call required, and nothing is stored.
Two situations we’re seeing more of
You just landed an AI capacity grant
Digital-capacity, cybersecurity, and AI-specific grant lines have widened, and the $500 million foundation pool above is part of a broader shift. If you’ve won one, budget isn’t the problem any more. Spending it on something durable, and being able to show the funder what it bought, is.
Education fits that well because the deliverable is capability that stays with your people, plus artifacts you can attach to a report: a training log, completion records, role-to-AI-system mapping, and one workflow that measurably changed.
Bring the grant’s scope and its reporting requirements to the fit call. If there’s a spend deadline, say so early and we’ll work backwards from it.
You’re a funder upskilling your grantees
A different purchase: you’re buying capacity building for other organizations’ staff, and you answer to a board for what the cohort got out of it. We’ve done this. Our longest engagement to date, 10 hours over 5 weeks, was delivered through NonprofitBuilder to their own beneficiaries.
What that looks like: a shared core calibrated to a mixed cohort (different sectors, different starting points, often different time zones), role- or level-based tracks so a beginner and someone already building with AI both get their time’s worth, and reporting written for your board rather than a stack of individual completion records.
Scoped per cohort, not per seat.
How we teach it
Design
- Pedagogical design: engaging, participatory, for multiple audience starting points.
- We focus on the skills so people practice immediately useful patterns, tips, and tricks
- We also aim to teach “how to fish” with big-picture best practices for sustained judgment, and a touch of judgment on hype vs. reality, with a mission and purpose focus – especially important with an in flux frontier
- Format lengths ranging from an hour to a multi-week series. Our longest so far ran 10 hours over 5 weeks, with NonprofitBuilder
Delivery
- Human-first design, a space for trust working with AI
- Active learning designed to provide value for all audiences
- We work with your team to calibrate message and content, for a higher value of your people’s time
- Worksheets and take-home artifacts and resources relevant to your people’s needs
Standards
- Technical expertise and teaching expertise
- Research and use of AI in our own experiments, to filter out purposeless productivity
- Experience with diverse audiences around the globe and AI comfort levels
- Minimal hype, grounded approach: AI decisions are increasingly made by fear of looking behind, or by whoever’s most excited in the room, not by honest evaluation. We’re built to be the other kind of voice in the room
- A knowledge of AI education research findings and application as the field develops
Who delivers this
- Dan Garmat and Caroline Stauss, founders and directors of AlignIQ.
- 30+ years combined from data science with highly-sensitive data, statistics, communications, and teaching.
- 70+ participants across 30+ countries, from complete beginners to power users.
- 22+ hours of paid training engagements, plus 9+ hours of interactive webinars, seminars, and pro bono sessions. Growing.
- On our longest programme to date, 23 of 38 participants attended at least four of five sessions and 27 attended at least three, a voluntary commitment of up to 10 hours across a working month.
- We help purpose-driven teams transition into ethical, practical AI use.
What this is not. This education is intense, and on its own it is still not enough. What it does is start the conversation in the right direction and give your team a footing they can build on. Anyone promising that a course settles AI for your organization is overpromising. But it can jump-start something.
Frequently asked questions
Does this satisfy the EU AI Act’s Article 4 requirement, and what do we get?
Article 4 requires documented AI literacy for staff who use AI systems or are affected by them: not certification, not an exam. You come away with a completion record for each person, plus an evidence pack: a training log, a role-to-AI-system mapping worksheet, an AI acceptable-use policy starter, and a one-page memo mapping the course to Article 4.
Our courses are built for baseline literacy: the basics everyone on a team needs. If some of your people are working with more advanced agentic systems, building AI solutions other people rely on, or in roles where a mistake could cause harm, they need literacy beyond this course. We can help you figure out where that line falls for your team and quickly establish a baseline where it’s needed.
What organization sizes does this work for?
We specialize in small and medium organizations. If you’re just starting out, even as a team of one, cohort training needs a few more people to be worth it. The Article 4-focused course may be the better fit on its own. For larger organizations (500+ staff), we won’t turn you away, but we’re upfront that we may not have the team yet to pull off a rollout at that scale as well as we’d want to.
We don’t have budget for this right now.
This is the objection we hear most, usually from someone who already knows it’s needed and whose leadership doesn’t yet. A few places this has fit for others: a professional-development or capacity-building line, a security or compliance training budget, or a digital-capacity grant, the kind that funded our work with NonprofitBuilder. If the EU AI Act’s Article 4 applies to you, that’s a compliance argument too, not just a nice-to-have. And the fit call itself is free, so it’s a reasonable first step even before budget is secured.
Can’t staff just learn this on their own, from resources online?
You might get there eventually. You probably do not have time to wait for that. Some will, but usually alone, more slowly than it looks from the outside, and without the benefit of learning alongside colleagues. People get stuck with no one to ask. And the tools change fast enough that a mental model that was right six months ago can be wrong now. Self-teaching becomes close to a part-time job, and without protected time set aside for it, most people don’t keep it up. If your team has tried this already and it hasn’t taken hold, that’s often a sign the missing piece is shared structure and protected time, not effort.
We tried AI training before and it didn’t stick.
Common, and usually a sign the training covered AI in general rather than your team’s actual work. Ours starts from one regular workflow you choose in the first session, builds the skill on that, and ends each session with a specific, small step to apply that week, so by the end there’s a workflow that’s actually different, not just notes from a class.
Can this include grant writing or research specifically?
Yes. Those are common asks from mission-driven teams and we scope them as applied modules inside a cohort program: how to use AI on a grant narrative without losing your organization’s voice or overstating results, and how to use it for research support without treating output as a finished answer.
Do we need a policy in place before training, or training before a policy?
Either order works. Our training includes AI policy best practices built in, so it doesn’t assume a policy already exists. We support organizations before their policy is in place, during the process, and after it’s in place, including the leaders setting it.
What don’t you cover?
We don’t provide legal advice, a security audit, or a compliance certification. High-stakes AI use in your programs still needs human review regardless of how much training your team has had. See the note below.
Let’s find the right format for your team.
A short, no-cost call. We’ll recommend a length and a format based on what you’re solving for, and if a cohort isn’t right for where you are, we’ll say so.
What AlignIQ does and doesn’t do. AlignIQ does not provide legal advice. Our work is not a security audit, a vendor contract review, or a compliance certification. Sensitive, confidential, privileged, or client-identifiable information should not be entered into public AI tools. High-stakes AI outputs require human review. Tool and vendor choices may need separate legal, security, or compliance review, and we’ll flag where that applies.