Apparo wrapped up AI Foundations cohort, which assisted nonprofit organizations to overcome tech and operational related challenges with AI tools, allowing them to focus more time on their mission.
Sponsored by Bank of America
Apparo partnered with Bank of America to offer a 10-week Introduction to AI Cohort for 10 nonprofit organizations in the Charlotte area. These nonprofits gained skills to use Generative AI to make their organizational processes more efficient, thus freeing up more time to focus on their missions.
The 2025 Bank of America AI Foundations Cohort Participants were:
- Charlotte Speech and Hearing Center
- Dottie Rose Foundation
- GenOne
- HeartMath Tutoring
- Hope Haven, Inc.
- Jumping Dreams DD
- Sanctuary Counseling Group
- Sustain Charlotte
- The Park Community Development Corporation
- Veterans Bridge Home
Apparo and Bank of America wrapped up a 10-week Introduction to AI Cohort in May 2025.
Nonprofits attended a 4-part workshop series and were matched with a 1-on-1 technology mentor
In a 4-part educational workshop series, nonprofits learned how to use AI to maximize productivity, how to create prompts to get the results they want and how to address ethical and privacy concerns when using AI. They also had 4 one-on-one meetings with a skilled technology mentor who provided ongoing support and guidance throughout the program.
Thank you to the technology mentor volunteers from Bank of America:
- Chandra Chudeswaran Sankar
- Chris Welles
- Rod Spaugh
- GiriPrakash Annamalai
- Sandeep Gandhi
- Lacey Keener
- Abby Clark & Albert Hansen
- Sushil Golani
- Crystal Sellers
- David Randall
Nonprofits attended a 4-part workshop series and were matched with a 1-on-1 technology mentor.
Nonprofits share their experience:
- “As our team is growing, one of our main pain points has been spending time efficiently through onboarding and answering questions as new individuals join the team. Our mentor Chandra really helped us think about AI as an HR tool for PTO. We were able to work handbooks and documents into AI to use AI as a personalized search function so new teammates can leverage a true, consistent data source. This has streamlined and standardized our onboarding processes.” – Liza Stahnke, Charlotte Speech Hearing
- “I really enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to learn by example, not just the theoretical conversations but really digging in with our cohort meetings and our mentor. Something unexpected is how rapid the pace of AI development has been. When we first tried it out, we were getting stilted responses. More recently, we have been working on prompt-engineering to save time editing AI output to sound like our voice. It now requires minimal editing, which has been an enormous timesaver already. I appreciated the ability to customize our mentor sessions so we could dig deep into our specific issues as we navigate the challenges as a particularly small nonprofit. It’s really exciting to feel like we’re ahead of the curve, even though we have more to learn, as a nonprofit it’s great to have a solid AI foundation- so thank you.” – Meg Fencil Sustain Charlotte
Tech Mentors reflect on their experience:
- “I didn’t expect how much I would learn about GenOne and what they do. Learning about their mission was really inspiring for me to get more involved. We believe in the work GenOne and Apparo are doing and were happy to be involved.” – Rod Spaugh, Bank of America
- “I’m very grateful to be associated with the noble cause of the nonprofit. We learned they had never done an employee satisfaction survey and were able to launch a Microsoft form so the organization could implement the survey. I was very happy to see they could navigate and use these technologies to build what they need and are looking into how to smoothly apply them to HR and other processes. I’m looking forward to staying in touch and am so glad I could help.” – Sandeep Gandhi, Bank of America
To learn more about Apparo’s nonprofit technology programs and trainings, visit our Nonprofit Resources page.
