From tracking how authoritarian governments target dissidents living in exile to helping individuals in crisis find essential mental health support and advocating for legislation that protects free expression online, the landscape of non-profit work is undergoing a profound digital transformation. These critical initiatives represent only a few examples of how some of the world’s leading public interest and civil society organizations are building the future of non-profit operations and humanitarian advocacy with the help of Cloudflare.
Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how people across all sectors perform their daily work. The overarching goal of Cloudflare Impact is to help ensure that non-profit organizations and public interest groups are among the very first to benefit from these technological advancements rather than lagging behind. Recently, the company highlighted what dozens of civil society organizations have successfully built using its developer services, supported by more than $7.5 million in Cloudflare credits. These real-world stories demonstrate what becomes possible when advanced artificial intelligence applications are made accessible, secure, and affordable to build and run for organizations operating on tight budgets.
From "Keep Us Secure" to "Help Us Build"
At the core of Cloudflare’s broader philosophy is the belief that a better Internet is one that allows people to express themselves freely online and access a diverse, unobstructed range of viewpoints. A fundamental part of Cloudflare’s ongoing mission has always been making essential security services available for everyone, while helping to ensure that individuals and organizations working for the public interest are not forced offline by more powerful adversaries attempting to silence them. Through initiatives like Project Galileo, which provides free, enterprise-grade cybersecurity services to civil society organizations, the network currently protects more than 3,400 domains spread across more than 120 countries worldwide.
Through these long-standing partnerships, organizations have increasingly shared with Cloudflare how their operational needs have evolved. It is no longer just a matter of wanting to secure existing websites and applications against malicious actors; these groups now actively want to build entirely new applications tailored to their specific struggles. The emergence of artificial intelligence has allowed traditionally non-technical teams—such as human rights researchers, policy advocates, and community organizers—to design, build, and scale specialized tools tailored precisely for their unique workstreams to advance their organizational missions.
This transformative opportunity is arriving at a particularly challenging financial and operational moment for the global non-profit sector. Many organizations report operating under immense financial strain following major reductions in government foreign aid and philanthropic funding, which have contributed to widespread staffing layoffs and the sudden closure of vital programs. As these groups attempt to rebuild their operations in an increasingly complex and hostile environment, some have reported turning to artificial intelligence to help them do significantly more with fewer resources.
Yet, adoption across the sector remains largely ad hoc. According to a recent survey conducted by CIVICUS, more than half of civil society respondents viewed lingering privacy concerns as a primary barrier to adoption. These organizations frequently hold highly sensitive data—such as the real-world locations of endangered activists, the identities of anonymous whistleblowers, or logs of state-sponsored harassment—making them disproportionately vulnerable to sophisticated cyberattacks, a trend clearly documented in internal Cloudflare data regarding threats against civil society.
Additionally, the raw financial cost of building and running complex automation workflows can often be completely prohibitive for smaller groups. Among those surveyed by CIVICUS, 48% cited severe financial constraints as a major limitation restricting their ability to adopt modern AI technologies.
Cloudflare’s developer platform directly helps address these pressing concerns. The company’s developer services incorporate robust security and privacy protections right from the outset, rather than treating them as an afterthought. By running natively on Cloudflare’s massive global network, applications are automatically protected from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and various attempts to gain unauthorized access to internal systems. Furthermore, civil society groups can build and run applications much more cost-effectively. The lightweight and serverless architecture automatically scales to match fluctuating demand without requiring organizations to provision, manage, or pay for idle infrastructure sitting unused.
Tools like Workers AI remove the historical need to operate expensive, dedicated graphics processing unit (GPU) infrastructure, while AI Gateway provides crucial rate limits, deep observability into how team members are utilizing artificial intelligence models, and intelligent model routing to reduce unnecessary model calls and keep operating costs firmly under control.
Awarding $7.5 Million for the Next Generation of Civil Society Work
During the company’s annual Birthday Week initiative last year, Cloudflare announced an expansion of its Cloudflare for Startups program to explicitly include non-profit and public interest organizations, providing each accepted participant with up to $250,000 in credits for its suite of developer services. Company leadership recently announced that 30 diverse organizations were selected to participate in this inaugural non-profit startup cohort. The team has watched with enthusiasm as innovative ideas and custom-built tools designed to tackle complex problems in climate science, humanitarian aid, mental health support, civic engagement, and education have successfully come to life.
Among the participants are organizations tackling monumental global challenges. For example, some groups are actively tracking how governments increasingly target dissidents living in exile—a pervasive phenomenon known as transnational repression—while others are deploying automated systems to help people in crisis quickly locate and access critical mental health support services. Additional organizations are leveraging the platform to monitor legislative developments and advocate for stronger legal frameworks that protect free expression online.
Working Together to Build Automation Tools for Human Rights
Beyond providing financial credits and technical infrastructure, Cloudflare also engaged directly with larger civil society organizations that sought to build intricate, multi-step workflows and consequently welcomed additional engineering support from product experts. These ambitious projects frequently centered around variations of the exact same operational bottleneck: processing massive amounts of manually collected, dispersed information that urgently needed to be integrated, reviewed, and systematically structured in order for meaningful analysis and reporting to be conducted.
The data involved in these workflows is often extraordinarily sensitive, including the documented names and testimonies of human rights abuse victims. Consequently, the risks associated with unauthorized access, accidental data leakage, or algorithmic hallucinations in an output could potentially result in serious, real-world consequences for vulnerable populations.
To mitigate these risks, Cloudflare not only provided free access to its advanced developer services to support the creation of each custom tool, but also assembled a dedicated team of volunteer engineers—comprising product experts, front-end designers, back-end builders, and security advisors—to help design and construct them from the ground up. Central questions explored during this collaborative development process included determining precisely where automation is genuinely helpful, identifying which underlying AI models align best with specific tasks, incorporating necessary security controls, and ensuring that human oversight remains firmly integrated into every critical decision-making loop.
Early prototypes developed through this collaborative effort include specialized tracking systems designed for organizations like Freedom House to monitor instances of transnational repression, as well as customized operational dashboards built for groups like the Global Network Initiative (GNI) to track the status of critical stakeholder engagement opportunities around the globe.
What’s Next and How to Apply to the Second Cohort
It is remarkable to observe how civil society organizations are evolving their daily operations and outreach strategies in an era defined by artificial intelligence. Cloudflare executives noted that they are excited to play a supportive role in this broader societal transition. Working directly alongside these mission-driven organizations not only helps advance their individual goals, but also provides invaluable feedback that informs how Cloudflare approaches security and privacy in high-risk environments, ultimately guiding how the company can scale similar support programs moving forward.
The success of this first non-profit startup cohort demonstrates clearly how automation and artificial intelligence can empower the next generation of community service organizations to serve the public effectively, while doing so securely and affordably without compromising sensitive data.
Building on this momentum, Cloudflare has officially announced that starting today, its startup program is officially opening applications for its second cohort of non-profit organizations. Interested public interest groups and civil society organizations can submit their applications through the official Cloudflare portal by selecting the dedicated non-profit checkbox, paving the way for a new wave of secure, AI-powered humanitarian innovation.
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