Workshops | STRATEGIC PLANNING
AI as Accelerant
strategic planning for nonprofits and faith communities, built for the age of disruption
Your board has a fiduciary responsibility to the mission. That responsibility now includes understanding what AI is doing to your funding landscape, your workforce, the populations you serve, and the organizations competing for the same resources. This session brings board and staff into the same room to do what strategic planning has always done — and to add the layer most planning retreats are still leaving out.
Framework built on principles developed at MIT
A Focused Mission. By Design.
What's discussed in this room stays here. No recordings. No case studies without your explicit consent. This is a space for honest conversation — between board members and executive staff, between the vision and the infrastructure, between what your organization is and what it needs to become. You bring the mission. We help you build the framework to protect and sustain it in a landscape that is changing faster than most strategic plans account for.
Strategic Planning
has a new layer.
Most boards don't know it yet.
Traditional strategic planning gives organizations a shared language for priorities, resources, and accountability. Logic models, SWOT analyses, theory of change frameworks — these tools still work. What they were not designed to do is account for an environment where AI is reshaping donor expectations, funder requirements, program delivery models, and the administrative capacity of every organization in your sector simultaneously.
A nonprofit that completes a three-year strategic plan in 2026 without an AI disruption layer has planned in a vacuum. Not because AI is the most important thing on the agenda — it probably isn't — but because the assumptions underneath every other agenda item are shifting. Workforce capacity, technology budgets, constituent trust, grant eligibility, volunteer coordination — all of it now has an AI variable that belongs in the room when the board is making decisions.
This session is designed to bring that variable in without making it the center of gravity. Strategic planning stays the methodology. AI readiness becomes the pressure test.
Luna Lake has operated from this position directly. Before building a fully agentic company, this curriculum was developed while running AIA Mississippi and AIA Memphis as a sole employee. AI was not a competitive advantage in that context. It was the only way. That experience — including navigating board relationships, funder expectations, and stakeholder alignment on limited resources — is what grounds this session.
Less Administration. More Mission. A Board That Knows What It's Deciding.
This is a working session, not a seminar. Board members and staff leave with shared context, an organizational AI governance framework, and a functioning agentic infrastructure configured for your specific capacity. The first half of the session draws from traditional strategic planning methodology to establish priorities and pressure-test assumptions. The second half builds the AI layer: governance policy, adoption sequencing, workflow implementation, and a 90-day roadmap scaled to your organization — not to corporate throughput.
The most common outcome is not a list of AI tools to adopt. It is a board and staff team that agrees on what AI is for in their organization, who makes those decisions, and how to bring it in without losing the trust of the people they serve.
Private Session
Your Organization Only
Board, leadership, and staff in the same room.
A focused engagement built around your organization's specific situation — your programs, your governance structure, your funding relationships, and your community. The session opens with a traditional strategic planning diagnostic: where are you, where are you going, and what assumptions are you making about the next three years. From there, we introduce the AI disruption layer: what is changing in your sector, where your plan is exposed, and how to build governance and implementation capacity that protects the mission rather than distracts from it. Format ranges from a focused half-day to a full-day intensive. Pricing reflects your organization's size and scope, not a fixed corporate rate.
Public Cohort
Nonprofit Leaders Learning Together
Peer learning with others navigating the same terrain.
Executive directors and board chairs consistently report that the most valuable part of the cohort format is the room itself. When a small arts organization, a faith community, and a social services nonprofit are solving the same governance and adoption challenges from different angles, the collective map that emerges is more useful than any individual build. Cohort participants also tend to surface sector-specific concerns — funder restrictions on AI-generated content, constituent trust, digital equity, volunteer coordination — that private sessions sometimes miss because the organization is too close to its own situation. Full-day rate starting at $250. Morning intro session available at $35.
Strategic Planning Extension
Multi-Session Engagement
For organizations rebuilding how they operate.
Some organizations are not just implementing AI tools. They are reconsidering their entire operational model, often in the context of a leadership transition, a funding shift, or a strategic inflection point. The extension format runs across multiple sessions over several weeks and covers: full strategic plan pressure-testing with AI disruption variables, organizational AI governance policy development, workflow mapping and agent builds across departments, board and staff training, stakeholder communication planning, and a long-range roadmap for organizational sustainability. This is the format for organizations that want the board and the executive team aligned before anything is adopted — and want a governance structure in place before the first tool goes live.
What Belongs on Your Board's Agenda Right Now
Governance and Policy
01
Who in your organization decides which AI tools are used, and on what basis? How is constituent data handled when AI is involved? What disclosure is owed to donors, funders, and the populations you serve? A governance framework answers these questions before they become problems.
02
Funder Landscape
Some funders are already restricting AI-generated content in grant applications. Others are beginning to ask whether AI is affecting your staffing decisions and, if so, how. Understanding where your major funders stand — and how to communicate your AI approach credibly — is now part of development strategy.
03
Staff and Volunteer Adoption
The three fears that appear in every organization introducing AI are the same whether the organization has five employees or five hundred: staff fear of being replaced, leadership fear of falling behind organizations that have already adopted, and the fear among smaller teams that they cannot scale without it. Naming those fears in a room that includes board members and staff changes the adoption dynamic entirely.
04
Constituent Trust
Many nonprofits serve populations that have legitimate reasons to be cautious about AI: communities with histories of surveillance, clients sharing sensitive personal information, congregations with strong values around human relationship and presence. A thoughtful adoption strategy accounts for this. AI handling the administrative layer — not the relationship layer — is the distinction that matters most in mission-driven organizations.
05
Digital Equity
If your organization's mission includes closing access gaps, your AI adoption strategy has to account for how the tools you use model, reflect, or reinforce those gaps. This is not a reason to avoid AI. It is a reason to be deliberate about which workflows it touches and which it does not.
FAQs
Nonprofit leaders ask careful questions before they commit organizational time and budget to anything. Board chairs ask different ones. These are the questions that come up most often from both sides of that table.
Should board members attend, or is this primarily for staff?
Both, and ideally at the same time. The most common adoption failure in nonprofits is not technical — it is that board and staff are operating from different assumptions about what AI is for, who is responsible for it, and what it means for the organization's values. Getting them in the same room for the strategic planning portion of the session closes that gap before it becomes a governance problem.
Our funders restrict AI use in grant applications. Does this conflict with what you're teaching?
No, and this is worth addressing directly. Funder restrictions almost always apply to AI-generated grant narratives, not to AI-assisted operations. Building a Chief of Staff agent that manages your calendar, drafts board communications, and coordinates your event logistics is entirely separate from how you write your grant applications. We will map where your funding relationships create constraints and make sure your governance policy reflects them.
How does this fit into a traditional strategic planning process?
It is designed to layer into it, not replace it. If your organization already has a strategic planning methodology — a facilitator you use, a framework you trust — this session works alongside that. The AI disruption layer is the pressure test for the assumptions underneath your existing plan, not a competing agenda. We can also start from the ground up with a traditional strategic planning retreat format.
We serve vulnerable populations. How do we think about AI and constituent trust?
This is one of the most important questions a nonprofit can ask, and the fact that you are asking it puts you ahead of most. The short answer: AI handling your administrative infrastructure — scheduling, communications, grant research, board prep — does not touch your constituents at all. The longer answer is that your governance policy should specify, explicitly, which workflows AI touches and which it does not. We help you build that distinction into the policy rather than leaving it implicit.
Our board is skeptical of AI. Is this going to be a hard sell?
Skeptical board members are often the most valuable people in the room. Their questions about data privacy, mission alignment, and constituent impact are the right questions. The session is structured to create space for those questions before anything is adopted — not to sell AI, but to help the organization make a deliberate decision about how and whether to use it.
We don't have an IT department. Who maintains this after the session?
You do — and that is by design. Everything built during the session is explained in language your staff can act on without a technical background. The governance framework is written for a board that does not need to understand how AI works, only what decisions they are responsible for.
How does pricing work for nonprofits?
Pricing is determined by organization size, session format, and scope. It is not a fixed rate. The discovery call is where we figure out what makes sense before anything is invoiced. If budget is genuinely constrained, the public cohort is the most accessible entry point — starting at $35 for the morning session, $250 for the full day.