Cloudflare has awarded more than $7.5 million in credits to civil society organizations building on its developer services, and is opening applications for a second non-profit cohort. The company says the goal of Cloudflare Impact is to make sure non-profits are among the first to benefit from AI, and points to the sector's evolving ask: groups that once came for security now want help building new applications.

Project Galileo, Cloudflare's free cybersecurity program for civil society, currently protects more than 3,400 domains in over 120 countries. Through those relationships, organizations described a shift from securing existing applications to building new ones, with AI letting non-technical teams design and scale tools for their own workflows.

Cost and privacy pressures

The push comes amid financial strain. Many organizations report difficulties after major reductions in government funding contributed to layoffs and closed programs, and some say they use AI to do more with less. Adoption remains ad hoc, though: in a CIVICUS survey, more than half of civil society respondents named privacy concerns as a barrier, and 48% cited financial constraints limiting adoption. These groups hold sensitive data such as activist locations and the identities of anonymous sources, and Cloudflare's own data shows they are disproportionately targeted by cyberattacks. Cost is the other obstacle, since building and running complex automation workflows can be prohibitively expensive.

Cloudflare's answer is to fold security and privacy protections into its developer services from the outset. Applications run on its global network and are automatically protected from distributed denial-of-service attacks and attempts at unauthorized access to internal systems. The serverless architecture scales with demand without provisioning or paying for idle infrastructure. Workers AI removes the need to run dedicated GPU infrastructure, while AI Gateway supplies rate limits, observability into AI usage, and intelligent model routing to cut unnecessary model calls.

Inside the first cohort

Cloudflare expanded Cloudflare for Startups to non-profit and public interest organizations during Birthday Week last year, offering up to $250,000 in developer-service credits each. Thirty organizations were selected for the first cohort, working on climate science, humanitarian aid, mental health, civic engagement, and education.

  • LebTown, an independent non-profit newsroom covering Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, previously ran its operation across two Google Docs, a Google Calendar, Discord, and Gmail. It is replacing that setup with a custom editorial management system that follows stories from pitch to publication, tracks audience reach, and lets reporters log community impact from an app or through Discord. The team also built tools that convert county real-estate transfer records from PDF exports into structured data, plus a real-time copyeditor agent integrated with its WordPress site.
  • Kaya Guides built a WhatsApp-based mental health application pairing people experiencing depression in India with trained lay counselors, avoiding the cost and waitlists of traditional therapy. As of September 2026 it has supported 10,439 people, with 2,325 currently enrolled. The team migrated its care management system to Cloudflare and now processes around 500,000 WhatsApp messages a month. A live AI system listens to counseling calls and gives counselors real-time feedback. According to Kaya, this produced a program that is more consistent and self-correcting as it scales, without significant additional cost or complexity.
  • The Snorkelling Society, a UK non-profit, is building a web and mobile application called SnorkelMap for the global snorkeling community — helping people find new sites, explore location information, and contribute their own experiences. Because volunteers build and maintain it, the organization uses Cloudflare's secure storage for community contributions and uploaded images, and to guard against cyberattacks.

Engineering support for human rights workflows

Larger organizations asked for help with complex workflows, and Cloudflare assembled volunteer engineers — product experts, front-end designers, back-end builders, and security advisors — to build them alongside free developer-service access. Several projects tackle variations on one problem: large volumes of manually collected, dispersed information that must be integrated, reviewed, and structured before analysis. The data is sensitive, including the names of human rights abuse victims, so unauthorized access, leakage, or hallucinated output carries serious consequences. Open questions include where automation helps, which models fit which task, what security controls are required, and where a human must stay in the loop.

  • Freedom House, founded in 1941 to advance democracy and freedom, maintains a comprehensive database of transnational repression incidents — cases where governments reach across borders to silence dissent among diaspora and exile communities. Identifying incidents and coding patterns manually means sifting thousands of potential cases. The new interactive dashboard ingests, structures, and flags potential cases from public reporting, fine-tuned on the organization's methodology to improve accuracy, with Freedom House involved at every step. Security and data minimization drove every decision. Automating this first research stage lets staff focus on deeper analysis, reports, and work with policymakers.

Prototype of Freedom House's tool tracking transnational repression

  • Global Network Initiative, a membership organization of civil society groups, academics, investors, and tech companies (including Cloudflare) working on free expression and privacy online, tracks regulatory proposals, policy developments, and legal trends across dozens of jurisdictions — from EU online transparency requirements to Asia Pacific data localization mandates. The dashboard being built identifies these proposals and recommends advocacy opportunities based on GNI's mission and prior work, surfacing, describing, and categorizing relevant news, calls for comment, and legislative activity. It also tracks the internal review process and alerts staff to deadlines.

Prototype of GNI's dashboard that tracks the status of engagement opportunities

  • Article One, a consultancy advising companies on the human rights impacts of their policies, products, and operations, reviews and summarizes documentation ranging from factory audits to country-context reports. The risk assessment tool under development processes and structures that information, identifies salient human rights risks, and drafts recommendations for staff to review and refine. AI structures information; Article One makes all judgments.

Second cohort now open

Cloudflare says working alongside these organizations advances their missions while informing its own thinking on security and privacy in high-risk environments and on scaling similar programs. Applications for the second non-profit cohort are open through the startup program; organizations select the non-profit checkbox when applying.