Family first foundation
AI INSTITUTE • FOUNDED AT JPL • LOS ANGELES
26 YEARS OF TRUST HELPED US SEE THE NEXT CHALLENGE EARLY.
Family First Foundation spent decades earning access to schools, students, and families. When artificial intelligence began entering students' lives, that trust put us close enough to see a new problem before it became a national conversation: access had arrived before guidance.
$0.70
PER STUDENT / YEAR
K–12
ALL GRADE LEVELS
NSF
VALIDATION IN PROGRESS
2 Yrs
CLASSROOM DATA
THE ORIGIN
It Started in a Hallway at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory.
2023
"Two fathers. Two sons. Von Karman Hall. And a question nobody in AI was asking."
Richard Awni and Dr. Russell Knight, co-founders, longtime collaborators, and fathers, were both part of JPL/NASA Scout Troop 509. Their youngest sons were working on Eagle Scout projects. They met in Von Karman Hall at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and made a decision: run a basic AI training program for their local school district as a community giveback through Family First Foundation.
The first semester changed everything.
What they found wasn't a knowledge gap. It was a behavioral pattern nobody was addressing, in students, in adults, in entire organizations. The first generation ever introduced to AI, and nobody had trained them on how to use it as an amplifier. Every tool being handed to people was doing the opposite: reinforcing offloading, dependency, replacement of thought rather than extension of it.
Cognitive offloading - the soup du jour. And nobody was working on the behavioral engineering side of how humans actually think alongside AI.
WHAT WE SAW
THE TOOLS ARRIVED FIRST.
Students were already using AI for schoolwork, often before anyone had shown them how to question an answer, verify information, protect their own voice, or know when the machine was doing too much of the thinking for them.
Family First had seen this pattern before in another form: access without structure rarely creates the outcome you want.
So we asked a new question: How do we help young people use AI without giving up the thinking that makes learning matter?
STUDENT VOICES — LET THE PROOF SPEAK
WHAT CHANGE SOUNDS LIKE
The most important part of this story is not what adults say about AI. It is what students begin to say after they learn to slow down, question, compare, and verify.
"I used to ask AI for the answer. Now I compare, contrast, and check my work." — Paloma Jewell
WHAT GREW FROM THE WORK
FROM A FAMILY FIRST RESPONSE TO A SPECIALIZED INSTITUTE.
What began as a response to a problem we were seeing in real school environments grew beyond the scope of a traditional community foundation program.
Working with Dr. Russell Knight and other education and technology leaders, the early Family First work evolved into the Artificial Intelligence Institute, a separate organization created to carry the specialized AI-readiness work forward at greater scale.
Its public idea is simple: Driver's Education for Artificial Intelligence. Think first. AI helps second.
TWO ORGANIZATIONS. ONE SHARED CONCERN FOR THE NEXT GENERATION.
FAMILY FIRST FOUNDATION
26+ years of community trust, families, schools, youth access, sports, education, mentorship, and philanthropy.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE INSTITUTE
Specialized AI-readiness, behavioral science, technology, research, institutional implementation, and scalable training.
Family First opened the door. The Institute carries the specialized AI work forward.
WHAT FAMILY FIRST CONTINUES TO DO
Family First Foundation remains the philanthropic home for this mission. As part of how the Institute was founded, Family First retained the right to make this program free for every K-12 school and college in the country, we call it the 74-Cent Moonshot. Gifts supporting national access are made through Family First Foundation, a 501(c)(3).
