Kairos Fellowship

Kairos Fellowship is a U.S. digital-organising organisation that trains community and movement leaders in technology campaigning and runs grassroots campaigns to hold Big Tech accountable. Its name — from the Greek for "the opportune and decisive moment" — is meant programmatically: its starting premise is that the digital-organising layer of U.S. social-movement infrastructure has historically been short on leaders of colour, and that the rapid concentration of communications, advertising, surveillance, and AI infrastructure inside a handful of Big Tech firms is the decisive terrain on which racial and economic justice in the United States will be contested. Over the 2020s its work has shifted from a primarily fellowship-and-training emphasis into a campaigning organisation that pairs digital-leader development with public-output investigations of Big Tech's environmental footprint and frontline support for communities resisting hyperscale data-centre construction.

Founding, sponsorship, and incorporation

The Kairos Digital Fellowship was launched in 2016 by Mariana Ruiz Firmat together with Jackie Mahendra and what Ruiz Firmat has described as "more than a dozen other Black, Brown, and White people interested in diversifying the digital progressive space"; Ruiz Firmat brought a decade of organising and digital-campaigning experience from MoveOn.org and the Latino-organising group Presente.org. The fellowship ran initially as a fiscally sponsored programme inside Allied Media Projects, the Detroit-based home of the Allied Media Conference, which lists the Kairos Digital Fellowship as a core sponsored project since 2016 and credits the programme with having graduated 43 digital-strategist leaders of colour into national and state power-building organisations.

In late 2019 the team began the transition to autonomous operations. Ruiz Firmat has described the multi-year process: articles of incorporation were filed in November 2021, the tax-exempt application was submitted in February 2022, and 501(c)(3) status was granted in May 2022 under EIN 87-2868416, with the organisation registered in New York and staff distributed across the country rather than concentrated in a single office. In ProPublica's fiscal-year 2024 filing the organisation reports revenue of $1.91 million (99.7% from contributions), expenses of $2.33 million, and net assets of $3.65 million. Per InfluenceWatch's compilation of 990 filings, major institutional funders include the Ford Foundation (cumulative $1.4M), the MacArthur Foundation ($724k), Democracy Fund ($950k), the W.K. Kellogg Foundation ($600k), and the Tides Foundation ($250k).

Programmes

Kairos describes its current portfolio as four programme areas — the Fellowship, User Error, Fight Data Centers, and Trainings — with the Fellowship and the Fight Data Centers campaign as the load-bearing pieces.

The Fellowship

The Kairos Fellowship is an eight-month, salaried, full-benefits digital-organising programme aimed at "a field organizer, union organizer, community leader, or movement builder who wants to lead on digital strategies." The curriculum spans digital campaign strategy and online organising, narrative and communications, coding, and product development; participants begin with bootcamp-style training before being placed inside host organisations as digital strategists for the bulk of the eight months, with weekly cohort calls, individual mentorship, and two to three in-person retreats. Cumulatively the programme has graduated 43 digital strategists of colour across four cohorts, seeded into national and state-level power-building organisations across the country.

Fight Data Centers

The Fight Data Centers campaign is Kairos's current frontline programme on AI-era physical infrastructure. Its premise is that "data centers consume immense amounts of electricity, water, and land" and that the build-out of hyperscale facilities to service generative AI and cloud computing is the physical manifestation of the same Big Tech extraction that the organisation has campaigned against in the platform layer. The programme runs interactive organiser trainings, a "data center hotline" through which community groups facing a proposed local site can get strategic support, and a public Site Fight Guide, with campaigns@kairosfellows.org and organizing@kairosfellows.org as the named intake addresses. In August 2025 Kairos and MediaJustice co-published the organiser guide The Costs of Data Centers to Our Communities — and How to Fight Back, framed as a toolkit for community-led opposition and explicitly positioning data centres as "Big Tech's latest extraction scheme."

User Error and Trainings

The User Error programme is Kairos's tech-and-society public-communications work; the Trainings programme offers shorter, single-skill workshops in digital organising and data-centre resistance for partner organisations outside the eight-month fellowship pipeline.

Campaign history

Kairos has built its public profile through several high-visibility direct actions and coalition campaigns. The Tech Is Not Neutral campaign in July 2020 was a joint open letter — co-signed with the Movement for Black Lives, BYP100, Media Justice, and others — demanding that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Nextdoor terminate police contracts and adopt anti-racist platform policies; its September 2020 Nextdoor campaign attacked the platform's police partnerships head-on. The Facebook Logout in November 2021 mobilised over 55,000 pledge-takers behind a nationwide boycott of Meta's main platform, protesting Facebook's role in COVID disinformation and in the lead-up to the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack — Kairos's framing ("People make this platform powerful, and without users, there is no Facebook") consciously argued that platform power is a function of user mobilisation. Later campaigns took the same logic into Spanish-language disinformation accountability (2021, alongside members of Congress) and into Google's data collection in the wake of the Roe v. Wade reversal (2022).

From roughly 2023 onward, the campaigning shifted toward Big Tech's environmental footprint. In July 2025 Kairos published Google's eco-failures, a 53-page report two-and-a-half years in the making and co-authored by lead researcher Franz Ressel and senior campaign manager Nicole Sugerman. The report's headline claim — that Google's total greenhouse-gas emissions rose 1,515% between 2010 and 2024 (an additional 21.9 million tonnes in 2024 alone) and that Scope 2 emissions jumped 820% over the same window — became Kairos's anchor evidence base for its argument that Big Tech's net-zero claims are obscured by market-based accounting and that the generative-AI build-out is the proximate driver. Sugerman framed the work as a transparency demand: "We deserve transparency about Google's impact on our Earth and our lives."

Leadership

Co-founder Mariana Ruiz Firmat served as Executive Director from the programme's 2016 launch through to the beginning of 2025, including the transition to autonomous 501(c)(3) operations. Jacqueline ("Jacky") Brooks, who had been with Kairos as a programme associate since 2019, took over as Executive Director in January 2025. Nicole Sugerman has served as Senior Campaign Manager since February 2023 and is the public-facing lead on the climate-and-Big-Tech work, including Google's eco-failures and the April 2026 GAP-Kairos UK water report. The remaining staff page lists an operations manager, a senior communications strategist, an organizing manager, a senior campaigner, a development manager, a director of learning and analysis, and a director of operations and finance, supporting a roughly 14-employee organisation per fiscal-year 2024 records.

Position in the corpus

Kairos sits at an unusual intersection of the corpus's framings. It is a U.S. national grassroots organisation with an explicit racial- and economic-justice frame; it engages publics — community organisers, frontline communities resisting hyperscale data-centre proposals, Spanish-speaking voters, religious leaders, congressional offices — that are emphatically outside the AI-insider conversation; and its AI work runs through both an environmental register (the Google eco-failures report, the Fight Data Centers programme) and a platform-accountability register (the earlier Tech Is Not Neutral, Nextdoor, and Facebook Logout campaigns) that connect AI to long-standing organising traditions on policing, voting, and content moderation.

In the corpus's mapped UK / U.S. networks, Kairos is the primary U.S. counterpart to Global Action Plan's Big Tech programme: Sugerman is the named co-author of the April 2026 GAP-Kairos report Not a drop to drink, which supplied the water-side evidence base for the Foxglove / Global Action Plan challenge to UK hyperscale data centres, and Kairos has been a contributing organisation inside the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition alongside Friends of the Earth, Check My Ads, Global Action Plan, and Greenpeace USA. The August 2025 MediaJustice / Kairos data-centre organiser guide is the U.S. analogue of GAP's UK action-days infrastructure: a movement-organising toolkit produced jointly with a long-standing U.S. digital-civil-rights organisation, aimed at scaling community resistance to hyperscale facilities into the U.S. organising base. Together these pieces locate Kairos in the corpus as the leading U.S. grassroots organisation taking the make-AI-good frame into the physical-infrastructure layer.