European AI & Society Fund

The European AI & Society Fund (EAISF) is a Brussels-headquartered pooled philanthropic fund launched on 23 September 2020, hosted by the Network of European Foundations from offices at Rue Royale 94, 1000 Brussels. It was founded by seven philanthropic partners — the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the King Baudouin Foundation, Luminate, the Mozilla Foundation, the Oak Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and Stiftung Mercator — with an initial €1 million open call and the explicit goal of strengthening European civil society's capacity to shape AI policy alongside industry and government voices. As Director Catherine Miller put it, the Fund was set up because "we're at a critical moment where the direction of future technologies is being decided, and there's a very loud voice coming from private industry and governments, but civil society feels a lot quieter." On 21 February 2023 the Fund renamed itself from "European AI Fund" to "European AI & Society Fund," explaining that "the needs of people and society were at the heart of that mission from the start, but it wasn't always visible to everyone outside"; the rebrand coincided with a smaller-grants programme to lower the threshold for new entrants and a 2024 Open Call focused on policy and advocacy.

The Fund's structural shape is closer to a hosted re-granting vehicle than to an endowed foundation. The Network of European Foundations administers the legal and operational infrastructure, while a staff team led by Co-Directors Catherine Miller and Evelyne Paradis — together with Programme Managers Līva Vikmane (Community and Insights) and Alexandra Toth (Grantmaking), Senior Partnerships Manager Peggye Totozafy, and Programme and Grants Officer Caterina Sanniti — runs strategy, grantmaking, and convening. A Steering Committee co-chaired by Carla Hustedt of Stiftung Mercator's Centre for Digital Society and Guillermo Beltrà of Luminate Strategic Initiatives oversees direction. The Fund's stated theory of change names three objectives — a stronger, co-ordinated and independently funded public-interest community; a broader and more diverse base of funders backing public-interest AI agendas; and shared insights and infrastructure for strategic coordination across grantees and donors.

Partner foundations and capital

The Fund's roster of contributing foundations has roughly tripled since launch. The current partners list names eighteen foundations: the seven founding partners alongside the Adessium Foundation, the AI Collaborative, Fondation de France, the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Limelight Foundation, Porticus, Postcode Loterij, the Robert Bosch Foundation, and the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. Two further foundations — Bertelsmann Stiftung and the Isocrates Foundation — appear as past contributors who are no longer funding the vehicle. The Fund describes the partnership as "20 foundations" having contributed since 2020, with €13.6 million in cumulative grantmaking across 27 countries reported on its home page and a €4 million 2025 round representing its largest single-year disbursement to date. At its February 2023 rebrand the Fund reported nearly €5.5 million committed by 13 funding partners over the first three years; cumulative grantmaking through 2025 has grown past €14.5 million to roughly 70 organisations and 14 fellows.

The Fund is therefore best read as the principal pooled philanthropic vehicle through which civil-society organising on EU AI policy is resourced at scale. Several of its founding and current partners are themselves direct grantmakers of public-interest AI work in the corpus — the Mozilla Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation all co-launched the parallel ten-foundation Public Interest AI initiative announced on 1 November 2023, and the European AI & Society Fund is the European complement to that global coalition. Luminate and Stiftung Mercator anchor the Steering Committee, with Mozilla and Open Society active across both vehicles; the result is a small group of foundations operating two coordinated philanthropic structures — one global, one European — to underwrite civil-society capacity on AI.

Grantmaking and the EU AI Act coalition

The Fund's most consequential footprint sits inside the EU civil-society coalition that worked to shape the EU AI Act between 2021 and 2024 and is now turning to its implementation. The Fund explicitly supported the policy-advocacy infrastructure of European Digital Rights, where its funding sustained the EDRi policy team leading AI Act advocacy and the coalition-building work that linked EDRi's 50-plus member network; AlgorithmWatch, which the Fund's grantees page describes as a "leading civil society organisation in the field of social impact of automated decision-making" and which is now using continued Fund support to advocate for enforcement of the AI Act and the Digital Services Act; and Access Now, whose AI-regulation policy and advocacy work the Fund underwrites. The Fund's 13 December 2023 public statement on the AI Act political agreement carried verbatim positions from EDRi (on the deal's narrow ban on emotion-recognition systems "in workplaces and educational settings"), AlgorithmWatch (commending the mandatory fundamental-rights impact assessments and transparency duties for high-risk systems and crediting "the advocacy efforts of civil society organizations"), and Access Now (warning that the facial-recognition exceptions amount to "a guidebook on how to use a technology that has no place in a democratic, rights-based society"). The Reclaim Your Face European Citizens' Initiative — coordinated through EDRi and AlgorithmWatch and convening nearly 80,000 verified signatories on a biometric-mass-surveillance ban — is the campaign-side artefact most visibly underwritten by this funding stream.

Beyond the EU AI Act coalition the Fund's grantee roster reaches across the corpus's UK and pan-European actor base: Foxglove on strategic-litigation challenges to algorithmic decision-making in public services, the Ada Lovelace Institute on participatory research and biometrics policy, AI Forensics on platform-accountability investigations, Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties) on rights monitoring across the bloc, Epicenter.works on Austrian and pan-European digital rights, the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte on German strategic litigation, the Eticas Foundation on Spanish algorithmic-audit work, the Centre for Democracy & Technology's European office, the European Disability Forum, the European Network Against Racism, BEUC, BIRN, the Border Violence Monitoring Network, Friends of the Earth Europe and Ireland, Fundación Ciudadana Civio, Global Health Advocates, Glitch, and dozens of further organisations across more than two dozen European countries — alongside a smaller fellowship line that has supported figures such as David Grey Widder and the Bostoen / Monti academic partnership.

Position in the corpus funder slice

Within the funder slice of this corpus the European AI & Society Fund is the first Continental European entry — sitting alongside the five large US-headquartered foundations (Ford, MacArthur, Mozilla, Open Society Foundations, and the Democracy Fund), the two UK private trusts (Nuffield Foundation and the Sigrid Rausing Trust), and the pan-African pooled vehicle (African Digital Rights Fund). Structurally it is the closest sibling to the African Digital Rights Fund: both are pooled re-granting vehicles administered by a regional host (CIPESA in Kampala for ADRF, the Network of European Foundations in Brussels for EAISF), both raise capital round-by-round from a rotating set of philanthropic supporters several of whom also grantmake directly in their own name, and both fill a coverage role that the larger endowed foundations find structurally harder — small and mid-sized rapid-response grants to a wide regional civil-society base. Where they differ is in scale and focus: ADRF disburses USD 1,000–10,000 grants on a six-month cycle to roughly 18 organisations per round across 14 African countries on a broad digital-rights remit; EAISF disburses considerably larger multi-year grants — Open Calls have ranged into the hundreds of thousands of euros per grantee — to a roster of more than 65 organisations across 26 European countries on a sharper AI-policy and AI-society remit. Together the two vehicles give the corpus its two principal windows onto how organised philanthropy is moving capital through regional civil-society infrastructure rather than directly to individual grantees.