An Opening for Care: Our 2026 H1 Reflection

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

What has defined 2026 for me so far is not simply the pace of technological change, but the intensity of our response to it. We have been adjusting to AI for several years now, but as it moves beyond our screens and into our schools, workplaces, communities, and physical infrastructure, what feels different is the scale and speed of its arrival in everyday life. We are seeing that in the debates over data centers, what belongs in our classrooms, how work should change, and who gets to shape the systems that increasingly shape our lives. We feel it in our own team meetings at Siegel, too. Even after years of working on these questions, we are bringing our own worries, hopes, experiences, and relationships with technology into the room more than ever.

It would be easy to look at all of this emotion and see only anxiety, anger, or fatigue. I see something else: an opening. People are paying attention because they care deeply about what technology means for their families, their work, and their communities. That gives all of us an opportunity to meet that care with something useful. We can bring independent research into debates that are suddenly reaching much larger audiences. We can bring workers, educators, parents, communities, and other voices into conversations that have too often happened without them. We can support alternatives and new models rather than accepting that the dominant systems are the only possible ones. And we can keep asking the questions that help us see beyond the immediate moment: Who benefits? Who bears the costs? Who is missing? What are we assuming? How could we build differently?

That is what has given me and my team hope as we have worked through the first half of the year, and as we look toward the rest of it. I have watched our grantee partners take this moment seriously without pretending to have all the answers. They are extending their work into new corners of society, finding unlikely collaborators, testing new ideas, and bringing fresh energy to questions that have mattered for years. I hope we can continue to do the same. We do not need to resolve every debate about technology right now. We need to stay curious, be willing to say what we don’t know, and bring rigor to the questions we ask, building inquiry into every step of the work. And we need to put resources behind the people doing the hard work of figuring out what comes next.

There is an extraordinary amount of care in this moment. I am grateful to all of you for bringing yours to the work, and I am hopeful about what we can do with this opening together.

With thanks,

Joshua Elder

2026 H1 Giving

*Scheduled for payment by August 31st, 2026