Case Study: How Streetlives Won A $50,000 Grant with Vee.com's Grant AI Funding Tool

Overview

Organization: Streetlives

Focus: Technology designed with people experiencing homelessness

Funding Win: $50,000 from the Tech for Good Impact AwardsSupport

Tool: Grant AI by Vee

Streetlives is a New York City–based nonprofit building community-driven technology that helps people experiencing homelessness find and navigate essential services. Their platforms are rooted in lived experience, ensuring the people most affected by housing instability shape the tools meant to support them.

In 2025, Streetlives was selected as a $50,000 awardee of the Tech for Good Impact Awards—an extremely competitive, global grant program supported by the Zendesk Foundation. Grant AI played a key role in helping Streetlives translate its mission, impact, and technology into a compelling, funder-ready application.

The Challenge: High Stakes, Limited Time

Like many nonprofits, Streetlives operates with a small team and big ambitions. Applying for a national technology-focused grant required:

• Clearly articulating a complex, community-driven tech model

• Translating qualitative impact into clear, funder-friendly language

• Aligning outcomes with the award’s focus on equity, access, and technology for good

• Doing all of this without pulling time away from mission-critical work

For an organization centered on trust, dignity, and lived experience, the risk wasn’t just rejection, it was being misunderstood.

The Solution: Using Grant AI as a Strategic Teammate

Streetlives turned to Grant AI, Vee’s AI-powered grant assistant, to support the application process end-to-end.

With Grant AI, Streetlives was able to:

• Clarify and strengthen their narrative: Grant AI helped structure Streetlives’ story—connecting community-led design, technology infrastructure, and real-world outcomes in a way funders could quickly grasp.

• Align impact with funder priorities: The Tech for Good Impact Awards prioritize scalable, equitable tech solutions. Grant AI surfaced language and framing that directly mapped Streetlives’ work to those criteria.

• Save significant staff time: Instead of starting from a blank page, the team worked from tailored drafts, outlines, and refinements, freeing time for strategy and program delivery.

• Increase confidence before submission: Grant AI acted as a second set of eyes, helping ensure clarity, completeness, and alignment before final submission.

  
  
  
  

The Result: A $50,000 Tech for Good Impact Award

Streetlives was selected as a $50,000 award recipient, the highest funding tier of the Tech for Good Impact Awards.

The grant will help Streetlives:

• Strengthen and scale its digital platform

• Invest in user research and community feedback loops

• Expand access to trusted, peer-informed service information

• Continue building technology that centers dignity and lived experience

Beyond the funding, the award validates Streetlives’ belief that technology works best when it is built with the people it serves, not just for them.

About the Tech for Good Impact Awards

The Tech for Good Impact Awards are presented by the Zendesk Foundation as part of its broader Tech for Good program, which supports nonprofit organizations globally that use technology to create meaningful social impact. These awards provide multiple grants ranging from $5,000 to $50,000, plus access to technology tools and software donations designed to help nonprofits scale their reach and improve service delivery.

The program focuses on empowering organizations working in these impact areas:

• Fostering community by building connections that support resilience and thriving;

• Promoting resilience in crises by safeguarding against disasters and reducing human suffering;

• Creating career pathways into tech to reduce inequality and boost opportunity.

Applicants must clearly demonstrate how technology will help them serve beneficiary communities more effectively. Organizations are expected to write strong narrative and impact sections that align with Zendesk’s mission and evaluation criteria.

How Competitive Is the Tech for Good Space?

While exact application numbers for 2025 aren’t publicly broken out, the Tech for Good Impact Awards sit in a crowded global grant space where:

• Previous years’ cohorts drew hundreds of applicants worldwide, with only a small fraction selected for the top tier of awards including $50,000 grants. For example, in 2024 nearly 500 global nonprofits competed for awards across mission areas, and fewer than 20 were chosen for top recognition and support.

• Applicants span a wide range of missions, from youth skills development to crisis response, so standing out requires a sharp, well-articulated narrative that links mission to both technology use and measurable outcomes.

  
  

In other words: nonprofits aren’t just competing for funds, they’re competing for clarity of vision, impact measurement, and strategic alignment with the funder’s focus areas. Funders are increasingly using impact awards like this to signal support for organizations that pair technology adoption with community-driven results.

Where Grant AI Made the Difference

Winning in a competitive field like the Tech for Good Impact Awards isn’t just about writing an application, it’s about writing the right application. Here’s how Grant AI accelerated Streetlives’ success and helped them save precious staff time:

🚀 1. Faster Narrative Development

Grant AI helped Streetlives quickly turn core impact work into clear, funder-ready story sections, including mission descriptions, outcomes, and technology tie-ins. This eliminated hours (or days) of drafting and revising that would otherwise fall on Streetlives’ lean team.

🎯 2. Alignment with Funder Priorities

Because the Zendesk Impact Awards evaluate submissions based on how well they align with community resilience, tech adoption, and service scaling, Grant AI helped frame Streetlives’ work in that language, boosting the clarity and relevance of their application.

⏱️ 3. Time Saved for Mission Work

Instead of spending core staff hours wrestling with grant wording and structure, Streetlives’ team could stay focused on programming, community engagement, and day-to-day operations leveraging Grant AI as a strategic drafting partner.

💡 4. Confidence and Completeness

Grant AI’s iterative review suggestions functioned like a virtual co-writer, reducing uncertainty about whether key impact points were communicated strongly or whether the application hit crucial criteria. This confidence is especially important in programs like Tech for Good, where narrative quality can heavily influence selection decisions.

Why This Matters

In highly competitive tech-for-good award spaces, funding decisions are shaped not only by what an organization does, but how compellingly it can translate impact into funder language. Tools like Grant AI don’t replace a nonprofit’s mission expertise: they amplify that expertise, making applications clearer, more strategic, and more likely to resonate with reviewers.

For Streetlives, this meant competing not just on passion or need, but on a well-crafted, funder-aligned case for impact, and ultimately, winning the top $50,000 tier of the Tech for Good Impact Awards.

For nonprofits working at the intersection of technology and social impact, funding decisions often hinge on how clearly impact can be communicated, not just how meaningful the work is.

Streetlives’ success shows that when nonprofits have the right tools:

• Complex missions become funder-ready stories

• Small teams can compete on a national stage

• Technology and humanity don’t have to be at odds

Grant AI didn’t replace Streetlives’ voice—it helped amplify it.

About Grant AI

Grant AI is Vee’s AI-powered grant assistant, designed to help nonprofits find, apply for, and win funding more efficiently—without burning out their teams. From narrative development to application refinement, Grant AI supports nonprofits at every stage of the grant process.

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