How Three Organizations Are Using AI to Level the Playing Field
Access to legal support, family benefits and fair wages has historically been dependent on the ability to navigate complex and inequitable systems. While these systems are designed to protect low-income families, many struggle to take advantage of them. Three grantees of the GitLab Foundation’s AI for Economic Opportunity Fund are using AI to change that, delivering personalized, expert guidance.
Their work is part of the Foundation’s largest cohort yet: 16 organizations selected from more than 800 applications representing a growing movement of AI in the social impact sector. Each recipient receives $250,000 in catalytic funding, six months of technical support from OpenAI engineers and API credits to help move their work from prototype to impact.
Building Worker Power with Ask Aya
The nannies, house cleaners and home care aides who keep America’s households running are among the most economically vulnerable workers in our country, earning a median wage of $13.79 per hour. Many are employed with informal arrangements and don’t have access to the legal protections that other workers take for granted. The National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) built Ask Aya alongside more than 1,000 domestic workers to address this directly. The AI-powered platform delivers personalized legal guidance, negotiation coaching and community resources through a mobile-friendly Membership Center. Aya also tailors every response to each worker’s state and type of work to surface specific rights that apply to their situation.
The results are already tangible. “Ask Aya has not only been a tool, it has given me the confidence and security to talk to my employer to gain better conditions,” shared one user, Leydy. NDWA is aiming to reach 220,000 domestic workers within three years of their launch.
Unlocking Benefits for Families
Low and moderate-income families are eligible for thousands of dollars in annual support including paid leave, WIC, SNAP, childcare subsidies and tax credits, but most never access them or simply don’t know that they exist.
Moms First built PaidLeave.AI to act as a knowledgeable resource that walks through each user’s eligibility for paid leave step by step. With support from the GitLab Foundation, Moms First is expanding their platform to cover childcare subsidies, WIC, SNAP, and tax credits all in one place, connecting parents to $3,000-$8,000 in annual benefits they were previously unaware of.
One mom in New York shared what that meant during one of the most difficult periods in her life. After a life-threatening hemorrhage and a baby in the NICU, she used PaidLeave.AI to access nearly $12,000 in state-covered parental leave, including two additional weeks of leave she qualified for due to her high-risk birth. PaidLeave.AI reached 185,000 parents in its first year alone.
Keeping Families Housed
In Colorado, most renters facing eviction lose, not because they have no case, but because they never file the required legal paperwork. Landlords almost always have attorneys, while renters almost never do. The gap in outcomes is stark: just 7% of unprepared renters keep their homes in eviction proceedings compared to 94% of those who have legal support.
The Community Economic Defense Project (CEDP), one of Colorado’s largest anti-poverty organizations, serves more than 5,000 households facing eviction annually. Their GitLab Foundation project, HousingLegalAdvice.AI, extends that reach, delivering real-time, personalized legal guidance and automatically generating the court documents tenants need to respond to eviction proceedings. The platform aims to reach 20,000 households, saving families an average of $15,000 over two years by preventing the cascading costs of displacement.
CEDP’s model is built on the core belief that legal support shouldn’t be a privilege. With HousingLegalAdvice.AI, a tenant facing eviction can get the same quality of guidance that a landlord’s attorney would otherwise make inaccessible to them.
The problems families face today aren’t new, and the solutions, whether legal advice, benefit navigation or wage negotiation, have long existed. What hasn’t been available is a way to deliver them with accessibility at scale. The AI for Economic Opportunity Fund is designed to make that possible.
Learn more about the full cohort of grantees and subscribe to the GitLab Foundation’s quarterly LinkedIn newsletter, Powering Progress, for more updates on our work.
