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Hack for Social Impact
Tech nonprofitNonprofit & NGO Partners

Partner with Hack for Social Impact

Bring the mission, context, and challenge. HSI brings technologists ready to build toward real-world impact. Hack for Social Impact works with nonprofits, NGOs, and governmental organizations to turn high-impact opportunities into hackathon-ready projects and practical prototypes.

  • Who we are
    A tech nonprofit that builds and deploys technology for mission-driven organizations to better serve their communities.
  • What we build toward
    Useful prototypes, responsible experimentation, and a path to real-world application.
  • Partner role
    Shape the challenge, guide teams, and help judge what is practical and appropriate.

Technology capacity for mission-driven innovation

Hack for Social Impact helps mission-driven partners move from an idea to better serve their community to a focused challenge that talented technologists can explore, prototype, and build — with the aim of a working solution the organization can deploy, not a demo that ends with the weekend.

01

Turn ambition into a buildable challenge.

02

Bring technical talent closer to the mission.

03

Prototype new paths to real-world impact.

Partners ready to scale real-world impact

We are looking for organizations that want technology to expand what they can do for beneficiaries. Examples include climate, housing, homelessness, legal aid, public health, education, human rights, civic services, journalism, economic mobility, food security, accessibility, and many other mission areas.

Strong partners bring

  • Deep knowledge of the people, communities, or systems they serve.
  • A high-impact opportunity where technology can unlock new capacity.
  • Context, materials, and guidance that help hackers build responsibly.
What we are looking for: challenges where technology can help organizations better serve people, reach more beneficiaries, uncover new insights, or act with greater impact.

From challenge design to prototype

A lightweight process keeps the work focused before, during, and after the hackathon.

01
Intro conversation
We learn about your mission, beneficiaries, priorities, and whether the challenge is a strong fit for the event.
02
Challenge scoping
Together, we clarify the real-world context, impact goal, available materials, and practical guardrails.
03
Partner materials preparation
HSI helps organize the context, examples, data, and guidance participants need to build with substance.
04
Hackathon collaboration and judging
Partner representatives guide teams and help judge which solutions are practical, ethical, and useful.
05
Follow-up
We review promising prototypes and discuss possible testing, refinement, pilots, or continued collaboration.

The gives and gets

A partnership works when both sides bring what the other cannot: partners bring mission context and judgment, and HSI brings builders, structure, momentum, and support.

What partners give

01
A high-impact challenge
A challenge where technology can expand service, access, insight, advocacy, coordination, or intervention.
02
Domain expertise and real-world judgment
Context about beneficiaries, constraints, operations, and what would be practical, responsible, and mission-aligned.
03
Shareable materials
Relevant data, documents, examples, workflows, reports, research, public records, or synthetic materials.
04
Availability and time commitment
2 to 3 prep meetings, at least one representative during the hackathon, judging participation, and willingness to continue implementing the project if development is satisfactory.

What partners get

01
Creative ideas to create impact
New ways to serve beneficiaries, use information, improve access, or expand organizational capacity.
02
Working prototypes of potential solutions
Functional demos, product concepts, analyses, workflows, technical designs, or next-step plans.
03
Volunteers and technical talent
Engineers, designers, data scientists, and product thinkers focused on your mission area.
04
Visibility and awareness in the community
Opportunities to share your work with builders, mentors, sponsors, judges, and the broader HSI network.
05
Coaching and mentorship
Support from HSI and mentors as your challenge is scoped, presented, evaluated, and considered for next steps.

Example problem statements

These are the statements we scoped with partners for our 2024 San Francisco event, to show the level of specificity we work toward together.

2024 San Francisco

4 statements
Empowering Tenants to Exercise Tenant Rights
Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto (CLSEPA)
Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto (CLSEPA) seeks to empower tenants to challenge landlords failing to maintain their legal obligations by analyzing historical public records to identify effective legal arguments based on past hearing orders.
Systematic Analysis of Building Code Variations for More Affordable Housing Development
The Terner Center for Housing Innovation
The Terner Center seeks new methods to analyze and compare building codes across jurisdictions. Minor variations in building codes between adjacent areas create significant complexity for builders, driving up construction costs and slowing housing development. Participants are invited to develop tools that will be given to housing developers to understand systematic differences between two or more of the 109 Bay Area jurisdictions, and/or to help Terner Center advocate for policy change for more unified building codes.
AI-Powered Translation Assistant for UN Technical Documents
UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)
UNCCD needs an intelligent translation system that leverages their extensive archive of professionally translated documents to create accurate translations of technical UN documents across all six UN languages.
Complex interactions between land degradation, drought, and people
UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)
UNCCD seeks entirely new methods to analyze relationships between land degradation, drought, and human populations using global geospatial datasets.

Common partner questions

Have a challenge where technology could expand your impact?

You bring the mission, beneficiary context, and real-world challenge. We help shape it into a buildable opportunity for talented technologists.

Bring us a problem

Tell us about your organization and the problem you want help with. We will follow up to talk it through before scoping anything.