Announcing the winners of the 2021-2022 AWS Imagine Grant

Monitoring and repairing remote water systems to ensure clean drinking water for millions. Advancing health research for rare, chronic, and obstinate diseases. Promoting equity in conservation, health, education, and the arts. Pursuing scientific breakthroughs in interspecies communication. These are only a few of the visions of this year’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) Imagine Grant winners as they seek to improve the world with the help of cloud technology.

This year’s cohort of nonprofits represents the biggest group of winners out of a record number of applications, each exhibiting a commitment to innovation and an insistence on the highest standards for the mission areas they serve. For the first time, this year’s Imagine Grant offered two distinct award categories, inviting nonprofits of all sizes to put forward both advanced technical projects in the Go Further, Faster award category and foundational IT projects in the Momentum to Modernize award category.

The 10 winners of the Go Further, Faster award include:

• American Forests is scaling and enhancing the advanced analytics capability of the Tree Equity Score, a tool which helps cities in the United States address a problem that exacerbates social inequities and climate change impacts nationwide—that there are often far fewer trees in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods.
• The Barnes Foundation is undertaking the creation of an industry-transforming digital arts education platform, which leverages advanced technologies to create an immersive arts learning environment accessible to learners of all ages from around the world.
• charity: water is reinventing how water systems are monitored and repaired by leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) to scale their water sensor solutions, ensuring access to clean drinking water for millions of people in developing countries.
• Community Organized Relief Effort (CORE) is launching COREConnect, a unified disaster response tool that aggregates critical basic services during the recovery and preparation phases of the disaster cycle, enabling all service providers to collaborate within one interface and beneficiaries to receive the right services, faster.
• Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation is leveraging next-generation technology and machine learning tools to gain deeper insight into the data and biosamples housed within IBD Plexus®, their scientific data sharing platform, to accelerate research and help individuals suffering from Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
• EB Research Partnership is developing a first-of-its-kind collaborative digital platform that unites scientists, industry, and patients to accelerate outcomes in Epidermolysis Bullosa research that will also benefit the field of rare disease research.
• Houston Food Bank is launching a cloud-native digital logistics platform to better serve vulnerable populations facing food insecurity.
• Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR) intends to transform its entrusted patient outcomes data through a collaborative data sharing platform that includes advanced analytics. This solution under development will accelerate data to knowledge to improve patient outcomes, promote health equity, and increase survival rate for transplant patients.
• Project CETI is using machine learning (ML) and state-of-the-art gentle robotics to collect and process whale bioacoustic data at the scale and level of detail never attempted before, in an attempt to decipher sperm whale communication and communicate back. In interpreting their voices, CETI aims to demonstrate that today’s most cutting-edge technologies can be used to benefit both humankind and other species.
• 2022 Special Olympics USA Games is developing an immersive mobile application at scale, elevating the way athletes, families, fans, coaches, and others engage during the 2022 Special Olympics USA Games.

The 10 winners of the Momentum to Modernize award include:

• ACT is automating and scaling their data integration solution to aggregate student outcome data from multiple sources and reduce their manual analysis. This will increase their data validity, allowing more time to focus on their mission and help all students achieve educational success.
• Black Girls CODE is dedicated to leveling the playing field for girls of color in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) by utilizing Amazon CloudSearch to house and celebrate student technology projects as they participate in intensive virtual training sessions.
• Easterseals Serving District of Columbia (DC), Maryland, and Virginia is implementing a data lake solution to eliminate data silos across their organization to better understand and provide services to the thousands of people with disabilities, veterans, and other community members they serve each year.
• International Association of Fire Fighters is migrating and modernizing efforts to ensure effective communication during man-made and natural disasters so that affected jurisdictions can continue to provide adequate fire and emergency medical services to their communities.
• Jacaranda Health is embarking on an ambitious expansion of its evidence-based, tech-enabled programs to improve maternal health outcomes for over a million women across Sub-Saharan Africa.
• March of Dimes is migrating and modernizing their digital presence, applications, and database, allowing them to redirect cost savings to research, fundraising, and mission delivery.
• The New York Philharmonic is expanding access to classical music through digital transformation. Their new infrastructure will empower a global userbase to engage with historical records dating back to the Orchestra’s founding in 1842.
• Stop Soldier Suicide is modernizing its mission applications, enabling real-time identification of service members and veterans at high risk for suicide and thus empowering immediate, barrier-free access to life-saving interventions in pursuit of its goal to reduce the military suicide rate by 40% no later than 2030.
• Stroud Water Research Center and partner LimnoTech, Inc are developing an IoT-driven environmental data sharing and visualization portal to build trust in water data by making that data findable, accessible, and interoperable across the internet. Monitor My Watershed empowers citizens, scientists, educators, and managers with knowledge of water conditions in real-time to help them advance stewardship of the world’s water resources.
• United Way Worldwide is creating a universal single-sign-on (SSO) profile system to build direct relationships with people across its global footprint. This will enable United Way to become the destination for community connectedness for every person who wants to improve their community or access life-changing services.

AWS believes that technology— when leveraged strategically— is a powerful force multiplier in advancing social and environmental issues. AWS is committed to being a collaborator with nonprofit organizations in identifying and implementing the right technology solutions for their mission areas, no matter where they are in their cloud journey.

Winners of the Go Further, Faster award receive up to $150,000 in unrestricted funding, up to $100,000 in AWS Promotional Credit, and engagement with AWS technical specialists. Winners of the Momentum to Modernize award receive up to $30,000 in unrestricted funding, up to $10,000 in AWS Promotional Credit, and project implementation support.

The application cycle for next year’s AWS Imagine Grant will open in the spring of 2022. Sign up to receive email alerts about the launch of the next cycle.

About the Imagine Grant
Since the launch of the Imagine Grant program in 2018, AWS has awarded over $4.5 million in cash, AWS Promotional Credit, and AWS training support to 46 nonprofit organizations. Learn more about past recipients in our Powered by Purpose ebook and documentary series.

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