Rising Routes turns outdoor data into funding with AI-powered HubLife™

Rising Routes works to strengthen Colorado’s outdoor access ecosystem by supporting the organizations and leaders that make outdoor education and recreation possible. Through its statewide research, the nonprofit identified persistent barriers facing these providers, including funding instability, transportation and equipment access, workforce development and training needs, and fragmented collaboration.

As part of this work, Rising Routes created a public map of providers across Colorado, bringing information from different sources into one place. The map attracted interest, but its static format limited how people could use the information.

Rising Routes wanted a better way to share information about outdoor providers, the communities they serve, funding opportunities, and outdoor equity outcomes, helping organizations, funders, and policymakers make more informed decisions about collaboration, policy, and resource distribution. “We wanted to go beyond static maps and data,” says Jason Swann, founder and executive director of Rising Routes. The organization had initially explored building a provider mapping platform, but the bigger challenge was creating infrastructure that could support growing volumes of data and eventually scale beyond Colorado.

Rising Routes began working with AWS Partner RSMC, which had developed HubLife^™, an Amazon Quick managed service designed to help mission-driven organizations use AI and data more effectively. As RSMC explored Rising Routes’ requirements, the team identified opportunities to use the organization’s data across a broader range of activities. “We saw that HubLife could take Rising Routes beyond mapping, using the same data to support additional visualizations and research. That’s when we realized HubLife was the right fit,” says Rochelle Manns, founder and CIO of RSMC.

RSMC implemented HubLife for Nonprofits for Rising Routes through a two-week POC-to-production funded engagement. The engagement led Rising Routes to invest in HubLife to support its initial priority use cases: grant management and policy research.

HubLife for Nonprofits helps Rising Routes centralize and share information across multiple outdoor education and recreation organizations. It brings together ready-to-use dashboards, integrations, automation, and AI agents to support activities such as grant matching, impact reporting, and donor or member stewardship.

RSMC worked with the AWS Business Outcomes Xcelerator (AWS BOX) team and AWS Partner Ingram Micro, a global distributor, to support development of HubLife for Nonprofits. AWS BOX benefits provided funding support, AWS credits, and go-to-market benefits that RSMC used to build a proof of concept, while Ingram Micro brought nonprofit industry knowledge that helped RSMC validate common sector needs and refine the solution. Together, the teams moved from concept to a launch-ready platform in six months.

Amazon Quick is at the center of the HubLife for Nonprofits experience, giving Rising Routes a way to bring data, research, and insights together in one environment. Amazon Quick spaces provides a shared space for working with data, while Amazon Quick Research supports nationwide policy research and Amazon Quick Sight helps turn data into storytelling and visualizations.

In addition, HubLife uses a curated set of AWS services to ingest, process, and prepare data for agents and other workflows. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides the storage layer, with AWS Lambda, Amazon Athena, and AWS Glue supporting data processing and preparation. Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail also support monitoring, security, and auditability across the platform and its agentic workflows. For survey-based research, RSMC plans to integrate Amazon Textract to extract information from paper and PDF responses and Amazon Comprehend for sentiment analysis.

“Working with RSMC helped us see how much further the platform could go beyond our initial vision, from grant matching and impact reporting to storytelling and visualization,” says Swann.

One of the first ways Rising Routes put HubLife into practice was with a Colorado-based climbing organization facing transportation barriers that limited its ability to serve the local community. Drawing on state and provider data already captured in HubLife, Rising Routes used the platform to develop an initial grant application and then strengthen it with the organization’s own story. “Using HubLife data and the group’s story, we built an impactful narrative for funders, securing $100,000 for equipment, including a van to improve access,” says Swann.

Building on this early success, Rising Routes is looking to extend this support beyond Colorado, with work already expanding into New Mexico and Arizona under consideration. With more than 400 providers already listed in its directory, Rising Routes sees an opportunity to help even more organizations strengthen their case for funding and participate more fully in the outdoor recreation economy. In Colorado, where significant public funding is expected to flow through statewide plans and agency programs, Rising Routes is particularly focused on helping providers serving underrepresented communities access the data and positioning they need to compete for those funds.

As the network grows, HubLife for Nonprofits helps Rising Routes extend grant management and impact reporting capabilities across multiple outdoor education and recreation providers. The platform helps address common resource gaps by giving providers tools to track grants, strengthen grant governance, and report on outcomes, while giving funders and policymakers greater visibility into how grant funding is used. By centralizing this information on AWS, Rising Routes can support more providers through a shared platform rather than relying on separate processes and systems for each organization.

“We want to make this the number one tool for outdoor education and recreation providers, helping more organizations grow and more communities access the outdoors,” says Swann.