Empower or Exploit: California Philanthropy’s Role in Bending the Arc of AI
Technology can be used to empower or to exploit—and AI is no exception. Whether AI delivers on its promise of broad-based prosperity or deepens existing inequities depends on our political and economic systems. Who decides the future of AI, who it benefits, and who it harms is the question of our time.
This webinar, co-hosted by Philanthropy California and Asset Funders Network California, convenes leading California voices to examine that choice in real time. Speakers will share LA County’s groundbreaking AI-powered homelessness prevention program—the first of its kind in the U.S.—as a model of equity-centered design, alongside research on how algorithmic rent-setting, surveillance pricing, and AI-driven data centers are deepening California’s affordability crisis. They will challenge the inevitability of AI’s harms, surface policy levers to reshape its trajectory and respond to economic disruption, and explore what values-driven AI philanthropy looks like in practice.
AI’s trajectory is not fixed. California funders are positioned to bend it toward economic justice.
Speakers
Elaine Chang, Director of Technological Innovation for Justice, Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School
Teri Olle, Vice President and Director, Economic Security California Action
Janey Rountree, Executive Director, California Policy Lab at UCLA
Lul Tesfai, Director of Program Development, The James Irvine Foundation
Moderator
Rebeca Rangel, Senior Director, Asset Funders Network
Co-hosted by:
