Money that meets the need.
$5,000 a year, seeded by New Era Systems and open to any sponsor who wants to grow the pool. This is not one check to one winner: awards are sized to the actual need, and they keep going out until the pool is spent.
It covers what adopting AI actually costs.
A member who needs $400 for a year of AI subscriptions gets $400. A member building a real solution might need $2,500 in API and cloud costs. The fund covers whatever the need actually is, sized to the vessel:
What awards pay for
AI subscriptions (ChatGPT, Claude, and the like). API fees. Cloud spend for real builds. Tooling and automation. If it’s a genuine cost of putting AI to work in your business, it’s in scope.
No cash up front, ever
Subscriptions: the fund pays the vendor directly for a full year. No cash changes hands, nothing to track afterward.
Everything else: reimbursement. You spend, submit receipts, and get paid back. Simple, documented, clean.
A plain-language heads-up: grant awards may count as taxable income to your business. The award agreement says so up front, so there are no surprises at tax time. Check with your tax professional.
Quality over quota.
There is no pressure to move money for its own sake. If nothing submitted in a cycle meets the bar, nothing is awarded that cycle, and every declined applicant hears a coherent, specific reason why, never a silent no.
Applications are judged first on whether the ask makes sense: does the budget match the need, is the plan coherent, is the impact plausible? Program priorities (minority-owned, woman-owned, and the smallest Ohio businesses first) shape the rest. See exactly how selection works.
The fund waitlists. It never closes.
- W-01Intake never pauses. When the year’s pool is spent, applications are still accepted and reviewed; strong ones join a waitlist.
- W-02The waitlist is ranked, not first-come-first-served. A strong application submitted late can outrank a weaker one submitted early, using the same scoring as every other award.
- W-03Approved-but-unfunded applications carry forward indefinitely, across cycles and years, until funded or withdrawn.
- W-04At year-end rollover, anyone still waitlisted carries into the new year’s pool just by declaring they want to. No re-application, no new paperwork.
- W-05A decline is a decline. Declined applications don’t sit on the waitlist, but a fresh application is always welcome.
The pool is open. This is what a dollar in it does.
New Era Systems seeds the fund at $5,000 a year and covers every cost of running it, which means a sponsor’s contribution has nowhere to go but awards. Sponsorship is denominated in businesses helped, not banner sizes:
- $400One subscription year. Puts a full year of AI subscriptions in the hands of one microbusiness, paid directly to the vendor.
- $2,500One real build. Covers the API and cloud costs of a business actually building an AI solution, not just subscribing to one.
- $5,000A doubled pool. Matches the seed and doubles what the fund can award this year.
Sponsors are credited by name wherever the fund is described, or can contribute quietly; either way, the money reaches members whole. If your organization wants to grow what this fund can do, start the conversation.