Building Narrative Power: funding and learning to craft new stories about AI
THIS FUND IS NOW CLOSED.
The stories we tell about technologies shape our perceptions of what’s valuable, what’s possible and what’s not. For too long the Big Tech industry has dominated our understanding of AI. With a new funding and learning programme, the European AI & Society Fund wants to help people and communities grow their power to shape new narratives about the technology we want.
The European AI & Society Fund is a pooled fund that mobilises a powerful public interest community in Europe to fight for Artificial Intelligence that serves people, society and planet. 18 funding partners have combined resources to award grants, build the field, fundraise and forge collective strategies. We don’t receive EU funding, funding from governments or from Big Tech.
Through our new €2 million Building Narrative Power programme, we are offering grants of up to €150,000 for organisations across Europe to build the narrative power of communities, and develop and test narrative strategies around three areas where AI’s impacts are most keenly felt: data centres, jobs and young people’s lives. Selected organisations will join a learning programme, sharing experiences from different countries and issues, finding commonalities and supporting each other.
Find out more about the programme, and whether you can apply below.
Why do we need to build narrative power?
AI is being adopted across all areas of our lives at unprecedented speed. It’s reshaping our economies, politics and societies. But people have too little say over what that change looks like. Major tech companies have persuaded business leaders and governments that only they can build our future. That we are in a race for economic competitiveness that only they can help us win. And that rules which safeguard the public mean we’ll lose.
These current dominant narratives have not emerged by themselves. They are the product of the tech industry’s well-resourced and long-term strategy to establish framings that work to its benefit. This drowns out the people who want AI to support, not erode, our human dignity, our democracies and the health of our planet. That’s why we want to invest in building alternative public interest narratives so that people and society can have a greater say over how and where AI technologies get adopted in Europe.
Narrative strategy themes
This programme will fund narrative strategy work that focuses on:
>Data centres powering AI
>AI and young people
>AI and jobs.
We have chosen these themes because research indicates these are the issues that the public care about the most. This creates an opportunity for organisations to engage communities about how AI affects them now – and what they wish for from the technologies.
Find out more about why we have chosen these three themes.
How to apply
This call for proposals is ONLY open to organisations in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
For this programme, we are not accepting applications from the UK, the Western Balkans or any other non-European countries.
For clarifications, please find our FAQs at the bottom of this page.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
We don’t have a set age range to define young people. Our broad definition could include children who are already starting to use AI, teenagers, students…our focus is on supporting young people to be included and have a say in how AI is deployed and developed, particularly because it affects their development.
As this is a relatively short programme, we want to ensure organisations we fund already have prior experience of working on narratives. We want to know if the work you propose seems feasible given your skills, experience and capacity with the time and money available.
Prior narrative experience could include:
- Engaging communities to understand their experiences and existing public sentiment
- Finding ways to expose contradictions in dominant narratives that are used to justify unequal power dynamics
- Imagining alternative narratives
- Testing and developing messages
- Shifting attitudes by expanding the public’s sense of what is possible
This narrative experience does not have to be related to AI or our priority themes.
Public opinion research points to data centres, jobs and young people as areas where the public is ready to mobilise around AI. Through the funding and learning programme we want to test these assumptions in practice.
You will need to choose one primary narrative theme to work on. Intersection with another theme is fine as long as it makes strategic sense to embed it into your narrative work. Find out more about why we have chosen these three themes.
Granted projects should develop narrative frames and test out messaging with specific audiences around a particular goal for change. It’s up to you to decide what the steps to achieve that goal are, and what the outcomes could be. Through this we want to:
– learn what narratives shift mindsets on AI and move people to respond differently.
– find out which narrative building approaches can potentially be replicated across issues and geographies.
– identify the combination of actors and skills that leads to effective outcomes.
– discover what infrastructure is helpful, whether that exists or needs to be created.
– see what internal and external factors enable organisations to do this work well, and what barriers exist.
The call for proposals is ONLY open to organisations in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
For this programme, we are not accepting applications from the UK, the Western Balkans or any other non-European countries.
If your organisation will be receiving grant funding in 2027 from the European AI & Society Fund, you will not be able to apply for a Building Narrative Power grant.
Past grantees of the European AI & Society Fund can apply for these grants if they meet the criteria. However, one objective of the grants programme is to discover new organisations across Europe with narrative change experience.
We are interested in work that is rooted in specific national, linguistic, cultural, or community contexts. Cross-border projects may be eligible where they focus on a clearly defined audience sharing a common context, language, or narrative environment. However, our learning programme will bring grantees together to learn from each other so keeping projects in on a country-level is fine.
For applicants who operate at regional or European level, proposed activities must focus on a specific national, sub-regional, linguistic, cultural, or community context. We do not fund projects whose primary objective is to create or deliver pan-European campaigns or narratives for a general European audience.
Applicants should be able to demonstrate why the proposed narrative work is tailored to the context and communities they intend to reach.
The aim of the programme is to build narrative power in communities, not develop new policy, advocacy or research. If you still believe your organisation meets the criteria, including having an idea for a project which is non-profit in nature, we would welcome an application from you.
If a university team – for example a research lab – doesn’t have its own legal personality, the host university should apply.
The European AI & Society Fund does not provide direct grants to other pooled funds or funding organisations that primarily focus on regranting to civil society. We advocate with our donors to directly support other pooled funds to make sure money is used efficiently and avoid incurring multiple layers of overhead costs. We work closely with other pooled funds to make sure that our strategies are complementary and that our respective grantees can benefit from available funding opportunities.
Subgranting that is part of the implementation of specific project objectives and coalition work is possible in line with the regranting policies of our hosting partner Network of European Foundations. This means that if you wish to subgrant more than €30,000 to a partner that does not have audited accounts, a financial controller should be put in place to verify the use of the funds.
We expect to fund 15 projects at most. We will invite approximately 25 applicants into the second round to submit a full application.
We know that there is far too little funding in this field and that there are also far too few open applications for funding so we expect to receive a large number of applications. In our last call for proposals, we received 325 applications and could only fund 15 projects. We are sorry that we will not be able to fund more of the excellent proposals that we are sure to receive. We continue to advocate among our philanthropic community for more resources to meet this need.
Grants will be up to €150,000. Payments are usually 50% on grant signing, 40% midway through the grant period subject to previous funds having been spent, 10% on completion of the grant.
We encourage applicants to make realistic judgements about the resources they will need to conduct the work and neither under nor overbudget their proposals.
As a general rule, organisations should not request more than the amount of their previous annual budget, except in exceptional cases where the need is motivated and demonstrated by the proposal and the accompanying budget.
If you don’t have a previous annual budget, we recommend you request a grant which is proportional with your project.
If your application is selected for a second stage application, we will request a more detailed budget breakdown of how you propose to use the grant funds.
Due diligence is the process by which we check that your organisation is who it says it is, and has enough experience, resources and capacity to deliver the project you are asking us to fund. During the first stage of the application, you won’t be asked to provide due diligence documentation. If you’re invited to submit a full application, you will need to submit additional documents. This usually takes some time to gather.
Below is a list of the documents we require so you know what it will involve. Please do not invest time in collating this information until you are invited to submit a full application in the second round.
The due diligence process has two parts: a financial and an organisational part. For the financial part:
- Proof of registration / articles of association
- Your 2024 accounts
- Your 2025 accounts
- Audit report 2025 (if applicable)
- Forecast annual budget for 2026
- Most recent operating budget (2025)
- Bank identification form
- Proposed budget for the project
For the organisational due diligence, you will need to fill in the due diligence questionnaire
These are requirements from our host institution NEF to ensure we meet our legal responsibilities and are confident the organisation has experience and processes in place to manage the requested amount.
Our belief at the European AI & Society Fund is that if harnessed with care and accountable to the public, AI technologies could help meet human needs and build the fair, democratic and sustainable societies we want to live in.
From research and insight from public interest organisations across Europe, it’s clear that AI is currently having a negative impact on jobs, young people and data centres powering AI are problematic.
The Building Narrative Power programme creates an opportunity to engage communities in discussing these issues, and imagining ways AI can be used without causing as much harm.