A million kids just lost the supervised version. Nobody funded a replacement.
We do not charge parents, because the families who need this most are the ones who would not have paid. That works only if organizations underwrite it.
The money is moving. It is not moving here.
| Recent AI literacy funding | Amount | Who it reaches |
|---|---|---|
| Google.org to NYC's three library systems | $3M | Library staff and working-age adults |
| Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic to the AFT | $23M | Teachers. The academy is based in New York. |
| Microsoft to National 4-H Council | $10M | Rural youth, ages 9 to 17 |
| Anyone, to families with elementary-age kids in New York City | $0 | Nobody |
New York City added ten thousand new elementary afterschool seats this year, in the same year it paused generative AI for elementary students. The guidance telling those providers what they may do about AI has not been written yet.
The city convened a coalition to recommend what happens next, and it reports in April 2027. Until then, what happens to K-8 AI learning outside school is an open question with no evidence behind it. We would like to be some of that evidence.
What partnership looks like.
Schools, libraries and community organizations
A family build night. A parent and a child arrive together and leave with something they made and a plan to sell it. Two hours, in your space, outside school hours. We bring the curriculum and the facilitator, and the curriculum stays free and stays yours.
Employers
Staff bring their own kids and build alongside them. It reads as an employee volunteer event, an engagement program and a community investment at the same time, which means it can come out of three different budgets. Twenty to two hundred families.
Funders
Our outcome is a completed transaction by a family. It is cheap to verify, impossible to self-report, and unusual in a field that mostly counts attendance. We publish our method and our limits without being asked.
The limits, stated before you ask.
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Nobody has proven that teaching a parent and child together beats teaching either alone. Two-generation programs show real gains for the parent and, on average, no measurable effect for the child. That is an open question this is designed to test, not a claim we get to make.
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The evidence that AI helps beginners most is real, and it is about adults. Large studies find AI raises novice performance far more than expert performance. Those studies looked at adult workers doing job tasks. Extending them to children is a leap and we will not pretend otherwise.
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Earning money is not proven to improve school outcomes. The largest study of youth employment found lower earnings for three years afterward and no effect on college attendance. We use a sale as a measuring instrument, not as a mechanism.
If you want the underlying papers, we will send the list before you ask for it.
Domenique and Terry Rice. Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Domenique founded PUSH for Empowered Pregnancy after we lost our son TJ to stillbirth. It works with parents, providers and policymakers on the systemic causes of preventable stillbirth, and helped launch one of the first Rainbow Clinics in the United States with Columbia University, which provides wraparound care for families going through a pregnancy after loss.
She built an organization from nothing in the worst year of her life and it changed how some hospitals treat people. That is the bar in this house for work worth doing. Ten percent of everything Build With Them brings in goes to PUSH, and Terry spends part of every week on it.
Terry has spent twenty years teaching people to build things. Business development at Meta and Adobe, a decade on the faculty at NYU, and training designed for Google, Amazon, EY and Berkshire Hathaway.
Our kids are between four and ten. Every one of them is under fourteen, which is exactly why we know the rules about kids and money as well as we do. We had to.
- Domenique Rice
- Founder, PUSH for Empowered Pregnancy. Parent, provider and policy advocacy on preventable stillbirth.
- PUSH and Columbia
- Helped launch one of the first US Rainbow Clinics, wraparound care for pregnancy after loss.
- Terry Rice, faculty
- New York University, ten-plus years. General Assembly.
- Before
- Meta and Adobe. Returned to Adobe in 2026 to keynote its Creator Summit.
- Training designed for
- Google, Amazon, EY, Berkshire Hathaway, Estée Lauder, L'Oréal, Levi's, Red Bull, Walmart.
- Startup mentor
- Amazon, Techstars, NYU Entrepreneurial Institute.
Let's talk before April.
That is when the city decides what happens next, and evidence produced before then is the only evidence that counts.