AWS IMAGINE Grant

Kiva believes in a financially inclusive world where all people hold the power to improve their lives. Financial systems exclude more than a billion people worldwide, preventing access to loans and vital services. This forces families to operate in unpredictable cash-only economies.

Kiva needed to develop a systems-change approach to help address the biggest hurdles to financial inclusion. They did so by leveraging emerging technologies to solve this complex problem at scale.

For 20 years, Breastcancer.org has been a leading digital resource for people affected by breast cancer. Receiving a breast cancer diagnosis can be confusing and overwhelming, which often yields an internet search of complex medical terms and difficult to navigate resources.

Breastcancer.org seeks to alleviate that confusion by providing personalized, expert guidance and support to help individuals make informed decisions about their breast cancer treatment. By leveraging Amazon Personalize, Breastcancer.org can make custom-built recommendations for individuals navigating the ever-evolving and complex field of treatment and diagnostics.

Seventy five million people are displaced worldwide. These refugees are trapped by language barriers every day.

Tarjimly believes it is a human right to be heard and understood.

An idea stemming from the Syrian refugee crisis, Tarjimly launched a machine learning based tool for refugees to eliminate language barriers in times of crisis, enabling volunteers to match with refugees who speak their language and dialect.

Hear their story.

The homeless face significant barriers when trying to find housing, and timing is crucial to ensuring quality of life.

In 1983, Claire West Orr asked herself why she wasn’t doing more to help the homeless populations in Los Angeles.

More than 30 years later, PATH is building a mobile application to match homeless individuals with housing through a map-based mobile platform leveraging chatbot technology.

Learn how PATH uses real-time data to help people find homes.

Forty percent of food is wasted in the United States. One in six people do not know where their next meal will come from.Often referred to as the Uber of food rescue, Replate has built an application to match surplus food to communities in need in real time. Replate uses technology to scale resources and has rescued more than 2 million pounds of food in three years.Find out how they do it.

Policy decisions affect our everyday lives.

Urban Institute is empowering policymakers, researchers, and individuals to use data for intelligent policy making. They are building a new API-first local policy data hub to empower policymakers and researchers to be proactive about using data for intelligent policy making.

Learn how their new API-first data hub transforms communities.

FamilySearch International is nonprofit organization that began in the 1800s as the Geological Society of Utah. Now, it is a high-tech organization that gathers, digitizes, stores, and publishes billions of genealogical records that enable people to connect with their ancestry.
   
To process data at this scale, FamilySearch uses AWS machine learning tools for handwriting recognition to expedite the transcription of genealogically significant historical documents worldwide. What was previously a manual process of transcribing handwritten documents in different languages, scripts, and formats is now automated by artificial intelligence.

All of these resources are free and publicly available in service of helping individuals discover more about who they are. 

GBH is a public media station based in Boston, MA and the largest producer of content for PBS. From breaking ground on the invention of closed captioning in the 1970s to now leveraging the cloud to edit and produce media, innovating with technology is part of their DNA.

GBH is implementing a highly scalable, cloud-based video editing system for public media organizations to deliver educational, illuminating, and inspiring content from anywhere in the world. By leveraging the ubiquity and convenience of cloud technology, GBH is democratizing access to quality media production, ensuring that the media represents everyone’s voices and perspectives.

Type One Diabetes (T1D) is an autoimmune disease that renders the body unable to make insulin. T1D affects more than 20 million individuals worldwide, and there is currently no cure. Today, research about T1D lives in siloed, disparate places in mutually incompatible formats across the research and clinical ecosystem, stymieing efforts to find a cure for this disease.

Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) is creating a global Diabetes Data Platform (D2 Platform) that centralizes and harmonizes these data sources in a secure data lake, and democratizes access to the data for researchers, clinicians, and other key diabetes stakeholders to drive actions across the ecosystem for cure(s), prevention and treatment of T1D.

Humanity is facing the great sixth extinction right now: species on our planet are becoming extinct hundreds of times higher than the average of the past 10 million years. For over 50 years, NatureServe has leveraged technology, science, and big data to establish a biodiversity observation network, synthesizing species and ecosystem data from more than 100 independent organizations across the Americas.

NatureServe considers itself nature’s technology firm. To enhance their capabilities, they are migrating their data infrastructure — storage, application, and analysis — to the AWS Cloud. This faster, cheaper, and more efficient collection and delivery of data enables NatureServe to help researchers, policymakers, and other land use better leverage data to protect our planet’s rich biodiversity. 

Tessitura Network is a nonprofit member-owned technology firm devoted to advancing the business of arts and culture. Before Tessitura, cultural organizations like theaters, operas, symphonies, and museums relied on many different systems to interact with their beneficiaries, which proved to be confusing, costly, and ineffective. 

To help cultural organizations around the world, Tessitura created a centralized technology platform that enables beneficiary touchpoints to happen together in a single place. To do this at scale and support a growing user base, Tessitura needed to migrate their existing on-premises systems to AWS.  

Tessitura’s increased capacity to perform better and innovate faster on behalf of its members now directly helps the arts and culture sector survive, adapt, and thrive. 

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and social enterprises need legal support to operate, scale into new countries and regions, and achieve policy and legislative change. These resources are often costly and hard to access. 

Thomson Reuters Foundation’s TrustLaw program, the world’s largest pro bono legal network, connects lawyers from leading law firms with civil society organizations to facilitate free legal assistance and enable groundbreaking legal research. By redeveloping the TrustLaw service into a world-class digital platform, TrustLaw builds a global community of changemakers fostering knowledge-sharing, learning and innovation, networking, and collaboration.