Ushering positive use of technology by enabling those solving the most critical social problems.
Partners
Hack for Social Impact enables mission-driven organizations to deploy emerging technology. Nonprofits, NGOs and government agencies bring a real need to better serve their beneficiaries; we scope it with them into a well-defined, high-leverage challenge that a team can build against in a weekend.
The hackathon plants the seed; we stay with partners and teams through the whole lifecycle, removing the barriers between a working prototype and deployment wherever needed.
Most hackathon projects die at the closing ceremony in a GitHub graveyard. Our point is not creating demos for a weekend. We focus on creating the right conditions for projects that actually get deployed, get funded, and end up in the hands of the organizations that need them.
See our impact
ClimatePresented at COP16Green Policy Agent helps the UN Convention to Combat Desertification make sense of land degradation and drought data across countries. It was presented at COP16, the UNCCD's decision-making conference, in front of policymakers and country leaders as part of the Peace Forest Initiative.
Housing affordabilityYC + $3M seedbild.ai reads architectural plans and drawings to work out what a project needs to be permitted and what it will cost. That jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction work is a large part of why affordable housing is slow and expensive to build. The team took it into Y Combinator and raised a $3M seed round, and has gone from participant to sponsor, staying generously active in our community.
Tenant justiceDeploying in legal clinicsTenant Case Navigator gives advocates a searchable database of historical case records, so they can find the arguments that have worked before. Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto was awarded a grant to finish the technical implementation, and the tool is being deployed in legal clinics to help people understand their own cases.
Previous sponsors and supporters.
Bring us a real problem. We scope it with you before the event, put a team on it for a weekend, and stay involved afterwards so the work does not stall.
Put your product in front of hundreds of developers, and see it deployed on real social problems — a genuinely positive use case for what you have built.
Volunteer at an event, or apply for the organizing team to help impactful technical solutions reach more missions and constituents.
We help local organisers run their own edition.
We would love to hear from you, whether you are a nonprofit, a sponsor, press, a participant, or have something else in mind.
