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Robin Hood AI Poverty Challenge Logo

Meet the Finalists

Join us in congratulating the nine finalists who will each receive $100,000 for their breakthrough AI innovations to expand opportunity and upward mobility. Three $1 million awardees will be announced in early 2025.

education

CALIFORNIA

Beyond 12 Education, Inc.

A GenAI College Success Coach to Increase Economic Mobility

Beyond 12 is designing and launching a Gen-AI-powered college success coach to serve millions of historically underserved college students annually. To reduce the college degree divide between students in the bottom income quartile and their wealthier peers, Beyond 12 is developing a personalized, evidence-based, and culturally inclusive GenAI-powered Coach to provide success coaching at scale to college students from underresourced communities. Using AI, Beyond 12 is scaling their proven coaching model to ensure all historically underserved college students have the opportunity to earn post-secondary degrees that allow them to break cycles of poverty and lead choice-filled lives.

Mainstay (formerly AdmitHub)
Google.org
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CALIFORNIA

Paloma Learning Inc.

Harnessing AI to unleash marginalized parents’ untapped teaching potential

Paloma’s app enables marginalized families to build a habit of tutoring their kids for 15 daily minutes. This transforms student learning outcomes and family efficacy. Research shows families—not schools—primarily determine academic outcomes. Nonetheless, districts have historically sidestepped families and focused narrowly on classrooms (where kids spend <13% waking hours). Paloma helps Title I districts dramatically accelerate student learning by unleashing parents’ untapped teaching potential. By helping parents tutor their kids daily, Paloma unlocks a world of instructional time that otherwise lays dormant in every school community. As one superintendent put it, “Paloma awakens the sleeping giant of parents as tutors.”

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New York

Teaching Lab

Leveraging AI to Improve Student Literacy and Optimize Teacher Time

Teaching Lab and its partners, Coursemojo and Magpie, will use AI-powered tutoring and curriculum-aligned teacher tools to dramatically improve student literacy outcomes, increase teacher effectiveness, and disrupt generational poverty. Learning to read is one of the most powerful anti-poverty tools. AI solutions, built based on the Science of Reading and high-quality curriculum, hold great promise to improve student literacy outcomes. The team’s transformational approach includes: 1) Magpie’s AI-enhanced First Foundations to build all literacy subskills; 2) Coursemojo’s AI-powered assistant teacher to build comprehension and writing skills; and 3) Teaching Lab’s coaching and professional learning to ensure teachers and product designers effectively implement for impact.

Coursemojo
Magpie
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Financial Empowerment

NEW YORK

The Legal Aid Society

AI with a Human Touch: Streamlining Helpline Services

The Legal Aid Society's (LAS) AI-powered Housing Helpline Information Retrieval Tool aids attorneys and paralegals by swiftly summarizing vetted information, allowing faster hotline response times, increasing the number of people who can be served, and improving client satisfaction, while maintaining human connection and quality control. Developed with Columbia University, the Tool operates in a closed secure ecosystem, using vetted materials to help staff promptly find and summarize information. The solution leverages LAS’ expertise as NYC's largest and oldest legal service and will enhance the team’s ability to drive systemic change through informed advocacy and policy reform.

Columbia University's Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic
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WASHINGTON, DC

Nava Public Benefit Corporation

Helping the Helpers: Chatbots Helping Staff Navigate Benefits Programs

Nava is developing an AI-powered assistive chatbot to help staff efficiently connect people in poverty to public benefits programs. The social safety net provides a lifeline for people experiencing poverty—but navigating and enrolling in public benefits programs is challenging. Many people need help from staff like caseworkers and call-center specialists. Nava is researching, prototyping, and piloting generative-AI-enabled tools to support these staff. One particular opportunity that Nava has uncovered is creating an assistive chatbot that can answer questions while a staff member is on the phone with someone—helping them quickly research and interpret complex program requirements.

Ovw
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NEW YORK

Upsolve

Upsolve Assist: the Financial Assistant for Low-Income Americans

Upsolve Assist is an AI-powered Financial Assistant helping low-income Americans reduce debt and improve credit at scale through personalized recommendations, back-and-forth conversation, and automated execution. Upsolve Assist helps users understand the best ways to reduce their debt and increase their credit score and then, wherever possible, helps them do it for free. Upsolve Assist’s bankruptcy module has already been used by 14,200 low-income families to erase over $600 million in debt.

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Workforce

CALIFORNIA

CodePath.org

Transforming Tech Education and Employment Outcomes for Underrepresented College Students

CodePath will use AI to personalize learning content to enable all students – regardless of background or university – to thrive in computer science programs. This solution transforms industry-oriented tech education for underrepresented college students. Today, CodePath’s proprietary learning management platform manages course logistics and allows instructors to choose content modules appropriate for their students. CodePath is designing context-aware AI tutors to support students’ personalized learning progression. The AI Tutor will incorporate course content and continuous evaluations of students to provide relevant, personalized support. This enables a wider range of students to master curriculum and prepare for upwardly-mobile tech careers.

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NEW YORK

FutureFit AI

AI-Enabled Workforce Services: Connecting Workforce and Social Supports

FutureFit AI and the Chinese-American Planning Council will offer an AI-powered one-stop solution that centralizes wraparound services and better connects jobseekers to training and employment. The comprehensive AI-powered workforce development platform will help the Chinese-American Planning Council to more effectively connect job seekers to resources, training and employment while streamlining staff workflows. By better integrating important elmeents of a fragmented ecosystem, FutureFitAI can ensure that more people obtain high-quality training and jobs that lift them into family-supporting wages.

Chinese-American Planning Council, Inc.
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MISSOURI

Unlocked Labs

Unlocking Opportunity: AI to Empower Incarcerated Learners

UnlockEd leverages AI to empower justice-involved individuals with transformative education and workforce readiness, breaking cycles of poverty and incarceration. By integrating AI-driven tutoring and learner guidance, the solution equips participants with essential skills and credentials, fostering economic mobility and reducing recidivism. UnlockEd’s scalable platform, developed in collaboration with correctional facilities and educational partners, ensures ethical AI use and meaningful community engagement, paving the way for broad societal impact and sustainable reentry outcomes.

Harvard Computational Policy Lab
Intel
Khan Academy
Maine Department of Corrections
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