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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CORE GENOME AMPLIFIER
science Three 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

Build With AI
A Core Lab of the RW Institute Makerspace

Build With AI

Every Thursday | 2:00 PM EST | 90 minutes | Starting July 9, 2026

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.

This is where you do it.

Build With AI is a weekly open lab where you bring a real project and leave with a working tool. Not a concept. Not a plan. Something that works.

Every session is live, facilitated, and hands-on. You show up with a problem. You build the solution. The people around you are doing the same thing with their own projects, and the cross-pollination is half the value.

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

AI is way past the chat window. We work across the full landscape of what's available right 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

You already use AI. You have a paid subscription to Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. You're past the "what is a prompt" stage and ready to build things that matter to your work. This is not a course. You show up, you build, you leave with something that works.

The Details

When: Every Thursday, 2:00 PM EST, 90 minutes

Starting: July 9, 2026

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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Five-Level Competency Ladder

1

Orientation

2

Exploration

3

Application

4

Proficiency

5

Integration

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. The output isn't a report that sits on a shelf. It's a working resource that participants have shaped from the start and can implement 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.

Team huddle with hands joined
Active
01

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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Active
02

Standards & Measures

A working group focused on the measurement problem that haunts the entire field: how do you measure whether a volunteer program actually changed anyone? This Genome Lab brings practitioners together to co-develop frameworks, instruments, and reporting standards that move beyond participation counts and into behavioral and identity-level outcomes.

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Active
03

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 real implementation experiences so the field stops making the same purchasing mistakes.

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Volunteer team at a community cleanup
NODE: CONNECTED
Tier 03

Amplifier Labs:
Microsoft Alumni Network

Amplifier Labs take existing initiatives, partnerships, or capabilities and scale their reach or deepen their impact through the Makerspace model. These aren't built from scratch. They're built on something that's already proven and ready for more.

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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