Cities Deliver: AI Solutions for Public Services

The Rockefeller Foundation and OpenAI Foundation are committing $50 million to Cities Deliver to support this work. The initiative will provide grants of $500,000 to $2 million to organizations working with city governments to improve public services through AI, especially for underserved communities. Together, these projects will aim to reach up to 100 million city residents worldwide.

Building on the lessons from this cohort and others, we aspire to grow our reach and impact through new funding partnerships, supporting the actors, sectors, and conditions necessary for safe AI solutions to benefit humanity. As societies work to shape the future of AI, we aim to spark imagination and make possible a future in which a mix of AI innovation and human ingenuity improves opportunities and wellbeing for the world’s most vulnerable communities.

Focus Areas

We are seeking proposals that improve access to and quality of public services in vulnerable or underserved communities in the following focus areas:

• Public health: Solutions that extend the reach and readiness of public health systems, from frontline care and disease surveillance to population-scale prevention. Includes healthcare, disability services, food access, and nutrition.

• Economic mobility: Solutions that use AI to connect unemployed and underemployed residents to income, skills, and benefits. Includes AI-enabled benefits enrollment, career navigation and skills-based hiring, and employer-aligned training.

• Environmental resilience: Solutions that help cities forecast, withstand, and recover from  environmental shocks, protecting both people and the infrastructure they depend on. Includes public safety and emergency services, energy and grid infrastructure, and land management in communities at risk.

• Civic engagement: Solutions that help city governments reach residents proactively and respond faster, from two-way service channels to participatory decision-making. Includes digital access and connectivity, court services, and permitting and regulatory processes. Excludes projects related to voting or elections.

We seek to fund proposals with the greatest potential to meaningfully and measurably improve city services.

Solutions must include a meaningful frontier AI component, which involves using recent generative AI models to complete complex tasks. We welcome solutions where frontier AI works in concert with and adds real value to the practical tools that already help cities serve their residents. We aim to support projects at two stages of development:

Seed: ($500,000 to <$1 million): Projects are early concepts that seek funding for a first pilot in a city context. Grantees would be provided with funding to refine an idea with city partners, build and test a prototype with real users, and pilot the solution in a city setting. By the end of a Seed grant, grantees should know whether the solution works in practice, whether people use it, whether it shows enough early results to justify expanding it, and what would be required to sustain and scale it in a city context.

Scale: ($1-2 million): Projects already been piloted in a city, shown early results, and seek funding to scale up. Grantees would be provided with funding to expand the solution within their city, reach more residents, neighborhoods, or services, or extend the solution to another city. By the end of a Scale grant, the solution should reach more people and have a credible path to longer-term financial sustainability, e.g., through government funding.

This call for proposals is platform agnostic; there is no requirement to use tools developed by OpenAI or preference for any AI platform.

Application Instructions

Please submit as one combined pdf labeled with PI’s Lastname, Firstname:

1. A one‐page letter of intent with a description of proposed aims and approach.
2. If the final application requires a statement of broader impacts, please summarize your plans to address the specific requirements on an additional page.
3. CV (not biosketch) of the PI including past grant funding.

to limitedsubs@uw.edu by 5:00 PM Wednesday, November 4, 2026. Late pre-proposals will not be considered. A required LOI needing OSP oversight is due to the sponsor 11/29/2026 so you will need to have your materials in to the Office of Sponsored Programs by 11/16/2026 (due to weekend days and UW holidays) if given the go‐ahead by the Limited Submissions review committee.