Tag: AWS Imagine Grant Program

The year 2024 was filled with both excitement and thoughtful consideration in the nonprofit sector as the world seeks to understand and apply transformative cloud technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance impact and increase productivity. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is privileged to work alongside organizations in the social sector who are using these tools for the benefit of people and our planet, and who are leading conversations about how to do it responsibly. We’re proud to announce that many of those organizations are AWS IMAGINE Grant winners, representing our largest cohort of recipients to date.

Nonprofit organizations are typically frugal and responsible. They strive to improve the human condition in innumerable ways, yet they cannot raise capital like a commercial organization, so they have to make the most of the resources they have. They apply that frugal approach to IT: they build and operate only what they need to pursue their mission, and constantly innovate both to meet mission objectives and optimize cost. Even with these constraints, nonprofits aspire to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, and often, they use innovative IT architectures on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to do it.

The 12th annual Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent conference debuted Innovation Talks—deep dives hosted by AWS thought leaders. Dave Levy, vice president of AWS worldwide public sector, delivered his talk, “Empowering citizens through digital innovation,” on Monday, November 27. Read this blog post to learn more about some of the public sector organizations using the AWS Cloud to improve people’s lives and the world.

At re:Invent 2022, AWS announced the winners of this year’s AWS IMAGINE Grant. Winners receive not only unrestricted funding, but also access to training and expert technical guidance. Although they represent diverse mission areas, each organization is committed to innovating with the cloud, using data to fuel their missions, and scaling access to vital services through cloud-enabled, digital tools. Meet this year’s winning nonprofits.

Easterseals, DC MD VA is a multifaceted nonprofit organization with the goal of enriching lives and expanding opportunities for children and adults in the Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) area, including people with disabilities and military backgrounds. With support from our account team at AWS, Easterseals established a data lake to better understand and define the impact our organization has on its participants with the overarching goal of empowering all people to to achieve their potential and live meaningful lives.

Advances in technology are transforming the way health research can be conducted. It is now possible to integrate data from siloed sources into a data lake, a central repository where health data are aggregated and analyzed at scale. Now, more than ever, there are opportunities for collaborative research to accelerate life-saving medical innovation – and that’s exactly what JDRF International, the leading global Type 1 Diabetes research and advocacy organization, is doing with AWS.

Jacaranda Health, a Kenya-based nonprofit organization, is on a mission to end preventable maternal and newborn deaths by deploying low-cost, sustainable solutions that improve the quality of care in government health systems. Jacaranda Health, a recipient of the 2021 AWS IMAGINE Grant award, uses AWS to power a health platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to connect mothers with timely information about pregnancy care, as well as potentially lifesaving advice and referrals to care facilities when it matters most.

Dive into conversations on the AWS Fix This podcast to learn how three AWS IMAGINE Grant winners are using the cloud to make impactful contributions to the planet through building community connections, preserving history, and saving lives.

In 2017, the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF) founded the Childhood Cancer Data Lab (Data Lab) to address an important gap in the pediatric cancer field: vast amounts of accumulated data were not being put to use at scale. To address this gap, the Data Lab used AWS to build refine.bio, an openly available collection of normalized bulk gene expression data, to make public datasets interoperable and reusable.

The IMAGINE: Nonprofit conference in Washington, DC brought together leaders, technologists, and mission-driven innovators in the nonprofit sector to learn, connect, and inspire. Over the course of the conference, attendees explored the ways technology helps nonprofits make a positive impact around the world. At the keynote, Dave Levy, vice president of US government, nonprofits, and healthcare at Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Allyson Fryhoff, managing director of nonprofits at AWS, highlighted how nonprofits are on the front lines of addressing some of society’s greatest needs, and how harnessing the power of data can be a force multiplier for change.