Current Core Lab: Build With AI

Build the Future
of Social Impact

The Makerspace is where practitioners stop consuming best practices and start building them.

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scienceThree Lab Tiers

Core Labs, Genome Labs, and Amplifier Labs. Each serves a different purpose, built on one shared principle: the people closest to the work are best positioned to advance it.

Most professional development in this field follows a familiar pattern: someone with expertise presents to a room of practitioners who take notes and go home. The Makerspace flips that model. Practitioners come together to co-develop the tools, frameworks, and resources the field actually needs, guided by research and tested in real environments.

Three types of labs run inside the Makerspace. Each one serves a different purpose, but they share a common principle: the people closest to the work are the best positioned to advance it.

Tier 01

Core Labs

Building foundational capabilities for the field

A Core Lab of the RW Institute Makerspace

Build With AI

Selected Thursdays | 2:00 PM ET | 90 minutes

You've watched the demos. You've seen people build entire applications in an afternoon, generate professional slide decks in minutes, spin up landing pages from a single conversation. You've thought: I want to do that.

Bring a real project to Build With AI and leave with a working tool. Each live, facilitated session gives participants time to build alongside others working on their own projects.

What You'll Actually Build

The range is the point. In any given session, someone might be:

+Standing up a client-facing web application using Lovable
+Automating a reporting workflow that currently eats four hours a week
+Building a research tool that pulls, synthesizes, and formats data from multiple sources
+Creating a branded slide deck that looks like a design team produced it
+Generating video content with MiniMax
+Prototyping an internal dashboard for their team

You bring the problem. We help you pick the right tool and build the thing.

The Tools We Use

We work with the tools available now:

Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini for reasoning, writing, analysis, and code generation.
Manus for autonomous multi-step tasks that would take you hours to do manually.
Lovable for building web applications without writing code from scratch.
MiniMax for video and multimodal content.
DeepSeek and Kimi for specialized tasks where these models outperform the big three.

You'll learn when to reach for which tool. That instinct is worth more than mastery of any single platform.

If Your Company Has You Stuck on Copilot

A lot of organizations have rolled out Copilot or another enterprise AI tool and called it done. If that's your situation, you're not locked out of what the serious models can do. You just need to know how to pair them. We'll show you how to use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and the specialized tools alongside whatever your company provides.

Who This Is For

This 2026 lab is for people who already use a paid Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini subscription and have a real project ready to build. It is a live build session with direct guidance.

The Details

When: Selected Thursdays, 2:00 PM ET, 90 minutes

Schedule: See the calendar for confirmed dates

Cost: Free. Build With AI is an open lab within the RW Institute Makerspace.

What to bring: A paid subscription to Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. A project you want to build.

Format: Live, facilitated, bring-your-own-project. You'll get direct guidance on tool selection, build strategy, and troubleshooting in real time.

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Best First Step

Check your readiness

Step 1 of 2east

If you're not sure whether this lab is the right room for you yet, start here. The readiness check helps you place yourself against the Five-Level Competency Ladder below and see what kind of value you are likely to get from the session.

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Five-Level Competency Ladder

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Click each level to see what it means for you as a prospective attendee. You do not need to arrive at level five, but this lab assumes you already use a paid AI model and can bring a real project.

Level 01

Orientation

You already use a paid AI model, but you are new to turning that experience into a working build. The lab helps you orient around a real project, choose a practical starting point, and work alongside people who are building too.

Level 02

Exploration

You have started experimenting and want guided exposure to what is possible. The lab helps you compare approaches, ask practical questions, and figure out which tools, methods, or workflows are worth pursuing further.

Level 03

Application

You are ready to use this on a real project. The lab helps you move from ideas into something usable: a working tool, a draft workflow, or a concrete build you can take back into your job right away.

Level 04

Proficiency

You already use these skills and want to get sharper. The lab helps you improve judgment, troubleshoot faster, and produce stronger results with less trial and error.

Level 05

Integration

You are weaving the skill into how your team or program operates. The lab helps you turn individual capability into repeatable practice, connect it to strategy, and build enough confidence to guide others.

target

Core Labs teach practitioners essential skills that cut across every program and every context. Structured learning experiences with a defined curriculum, built on RWI's research base.

Tier 02

Genome Labs

Collaborative working groups where corporate practitioners from different organizations come together over months to research, build, and pressure-test new tools and frameworks for the field. Participants shape a working resource from the start and can implement it immediately.

The name reflects the ambition: mapping the underlying structure of effective social impact practice, the way a genome maps the structure of a living system.

Active

The Empathy Project

A corporate volunteering coalition exploring how well-designed volunteer experiences can scale empathy work across organizations. This is not a headcount exercise. Participating companies are asked to design for proximity, meaning-making, and genuine solidarity rather than charity. Built in partnership with Acquaint. The point of scale is not more hours. It's more transformation.

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In Development

Standards & Measures

A proposed working group focused on a field-wide measurement question: how do you measure whether a volunteer program actually changed anyone? The concept is to bring practitioners together to co-develop frameworks, instruments, and reporting standards that move beyond participation counts and into behavioral and identity-level outcomes.

Active

Technology Review

Corporate social impact runs on a patchwork of platforms, and most of them were designed for something else. This Genome Lab evaluates, compares, and recommends technology solutions purpose-built or adapted for volunteer program management, measurement, and engagement. Practitioners share implementation experiences to help others avoid repeated purchasing mistakes.

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NODE: CONNECTED

Tier 03

Amplifier Labs:
Microsoft Alumni Network

Amplifier Labs build on existing initiatives, partnerships, or capabilities to expand their reach or deepen their impact through the Makerspace model.

This collaboration connects Microsoft Alumni Network expertise with the corporate volunteering community. The lab explores how AI tools can improve volunteer program design, matching, measurement, and storytelling. It brings technical depth from the alumni network together with field knowledge from RWI practitioners, producing resources and approaches that neither group would build alone.

Find Your Lab

Whether you're ready to build AI competence, co-develop industry tools, or extend an existing initiative, the Makerspace has a place for your work.

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Build the Futureof Social Impact