Most nonprofits can't hire a technology team. TechStewards is the one they share.

Your steward keeps your tools working after the people who built them leave. You own everything. We are responsible for it, the way a bookkeeper is responsible for the books.

160 member organizations91% of tools still running after 18 months$1,200 a month, median

A story from the future, written in 2026. The problem is real. Read the note at the bottom.

Volunteers in gloves sorting canned food and bananas on a long table at a food bank

The problem we were built for

Every nonprofit has a finance function, an HR function and a legal function, even if it is one part-time person. Almost none has a technology function. Large nonprofits hire one. The rest never will.

AI made building software cheap. It did not make the rest cheap: deciding what is worth building, defining it properly, and keeping it alive when models, prices and terms change every few months. Every accelerator, fellowship and credit program stops on the day the builder leaves.

The sector already shares every other scarce function. Money through fiscal sponsors (a larger charity holds the legal status and takes a fee). People through Taproot and Catchafire. Software through TechSoup. Learning through NTEN. Technology capability was the one thing nobody shared.

Identifywhat is worth building
Definethe problem and the owner
Buildor buy
Maintainthis is where everything stopped

We do all four. Maintain is the core service. It is the one nobody funded.

98%
of nonprofits use AI somewhere, mostly as individual convenience
8%
have an AI roadmap
57%
of executives have no AI budget
90%
of foundations offer grantees no AI funding or support

The sector in 2026, before we started. Sources at the bottom.

How it started

Five people working on laptops around a wooden table by a bright window
  1. September 2026. The gap had a name.

    A month inside thirteen small nonprofits showed the same thing everywhere. People used AI, nobody owned it, and nothing built by a volunteer or a fellow survived their leaving. The sector shared money, people, software and learning, but not technology capability. The founding memo called it the missing institution.

  2. January to June 2027. The test.

    A six-month pilot, run as a fiscally sponsored project rather than a new organization. It built nothing new. It adopted nine AI tools orphaned by 2025 accelerator cohorts and kept them running, and scoped work for three organizations too small to have been in any cohort. Two funders paid about $250,000 between them. In June, eleven of the twelve tools were still in use, and every member had a named owner, a budget line and a roadmap. The funders said go.

  3. October 2027. The first thousand Claude Corps fellows finished.

    Anthropic had placed 1,000 early-career builders in US nonprofits for a year, with $150 million behind them. Hosts owned what was built and were asked for "a plan for sustaining the fellow's work." Hundreds of organizations now held custom tools built by someone who had just left. TechStewards hired its first six full-time stewards from that cohort, to maintain tools they or their peers had built, under senior supervision. People called it "the second year of Claude Corps." That was reductive, and it was how most people first heard of us.

  4. 2028. The evidence.

    "What Happened After," an independent evaluation of 84 funded AI pilots from 2024 to 2026, found fewer than a third still in use eighteen months on. The predictor was not build quality. It was whether anyone had been paid to own the tool. Three funders wrote stewardship into their grant templates within the year. Membership grew from 30 to 90. When two AI vendors changed their terms that spring, forty members moved to other providers in six weeks. Nobody lost a tool.

  5. 2029. Owned by members.

    In April, members voted to convert TechStewards into a cooperative, so the shared data the stewards had begun to hold would be governed by the organizations whose data it was. We declined three acquisition offers and one invitation to become a foundation's internal team. Today we are 160 organizations and 22 stewards.

Numbers, and what to compare them with

160

member organizations. Median budget $640K. Seven in ten are under $1M.

Compare: Claude Corps hosts and most accelerators skip organizations under about $1M by design.

91%

of stewarded tools still in use 18 months after the builder left.

Compare: fewer than 1 in 3 funded AI pilots were still in use at 18 months. In one 2025 accelerator, 22 of 22 organizations built a prototype. The write-up does not say who runs any of them now.

$1,200

per member per month, median, for a named steward one to two days a month.

Compare: a fractional CTO costs $5,000 to $9,000 a month. One full-time junior technologist costs $85,000 a year plus benefits. The only AI maintenance retainer on the market in 2026 was $499 a month for a few hours, with no ownership.

7%

fee on the grant flow, paid by funders as a line item, plus dues scaled to budget.

Compare: Tides Center charges 9% to share a finance function. Nobody calls that overhead.

100%

of members have a named owner, a budget line and a roadmap for their technology.

Compare: in 2026, 8% of nonprofits had an AI roadmap and 57% of executives had no budget for it.

4

AI vendors in use across members at the same time.

Compare: Claude Corps is single-vendor. Most credit programs are single-vendor. Independence is why members can move.

Three members

Two women talking across a small table in front of a large window
Maintain, and vendor independence

The tool that outlived its builder

Who
A reentry services nonprofit in Ohio, supporting people after incarceration. $2.1M budget, 19 staff. Hosted two Claude Corps fellows in the first cohort.
What they had
In October 2027 the fellows left behind a case-manager triage tool that staff used every day, a written sustainability plan, and nobody who could read the code. In February 2028 the vendor changed its pricing and the tool's monthly bill tripled.
What the steward did
One of the fellows who built the tool joined TechStewards that October and became the organization's steward, two days a month. She documented the tool, added tests, and in March 2028 moved it to a second provider in nine working days. The organization kept the tool, the data and the workflow. The move was covered by dues.
What changed
The tool is in its third year. A different steward covers it now, which is the point: the organization no longer depends on one person. Their executive director sits on the cooperative's board.

The Claude Corps host FAQ asks for a sustainability plan. This is what one looks like when someone is paid to carry it out.

A youth soccer coach huddles with seven young players on a wet pitch
Identify and define, and saying no

The club that did not need AI first

Who
An all-volunteer youth soccer club in California. About $180,000 a year, a new eight-person board, 200 families, many of them Spanish-speaking.
What they had
A grant to "adopt AI for communications." Seven channels (text, email, WhatsApp, Facebook, Zoom, a website, phone calls), no single place to collect dues, and a free Slack workspace nobody had adopted.
What the steward did
The first visit produced a one-page decision: no AI this year. The problems were plumbing and language. The steward set up one bilingual channel and one payment path, wrote the operating rules, and trained two board members to run them. Eight months later, with the basics working, the club added an AI drafting step for grant reports, with a checklist for checking every fact before it left the building.
What changed
Dues collection went from 60% of families to 94%. The grant was spent on what the club needed rather than what the grant said. The funder used the write-up to change its own application form.

Most programs start at build. Our stewards are paid to start at identify, and to say no.

Three people reviewing printed documents together at a light wooden table
Value to funders: the grant-flow model

The funder whose pilots stopped dying

Who
A regional foundation giving about $40M a year. Sixteen AI-related grants in 2025, fourteen in 2028.
What they had
Of the sixteen tools funded in 2025, five were still in use two years later. Program officers could not evaluate an AI proposal, and grantees could not evaluate a vendor. The foundation had no way to fund maintenance without calling it overhead.
What the steward did
In 2028 the foundation wrote stewardship into its grant template as a 7% line, the way it already paid fiscal sponsors. Each of the fourteen grantees got a named steward from day one, before anything was built. TechStewards supplied the twelve diligence questions its program officers now ask of every AI proposal.
What changed
Thirteen of the fourteen tools from the 2028 cohort are in use today. The foundation's cost per surviving tool fell by about two-thirds. Two grantees turned out not to need software at all, and that money went elsewhere.

90% of foundations offer grantees no AI support. The ones that do mostly fund building. This funder funds owning.

Work with us

For nonprofits

Membership opens twice a year, in January and July. Dues are scaled to your budget, starting at $300 a month for organizations under $250,000. If your funder pays a stewardship line, dues are covered.

Next intake: January 2030.

For funders

Write stewardship into your grant template as a line item, the way you already pay fiscal sponsors. We supply the wording, the diligence questions, and a steward for each grantee from day one.

Eleven funders do this now.

For stewards

We hire people who have built something inside a nonprofit and want to keep it alive. Claude Corps alumni are our largest source. Senior practitioners supervise, and every steward covers six to nine members.

Hiring for the February 2030 cohort is open.

For researchers and evaluators

Everything we learn is published: the playbook, the diligence questions, and the survival data on every tool we steward, with member consent.

We are looking for an evaluation partner for the 2030 follow-up to "What Happened After."

Who we are

22 stewards, 4 senior practitioners, a small operations team, and a member-elected board of seven. Most stewards are early in their careers, and most came through Claude Corps. Every senior practitioner has run technology inside a nonprofit for at least ten years.