Issue No. 3 | February 2026

A few months ago, I learned that one of my grantee organizations had deliberately blocked AI from accessing its website. This meant that when the organization’s largest private donor entered a query into ChatGPT asking “who are the largest donors” of the organization, ChatGPT could not access this information. Instead, ChatGPT based its response on an old press report which mentioned a very small sponsor who was no longer involved. The major donor was understandably upset, as they saw their support for the organization as an important philanthropic partnership and had assumed the organization felt the same way.

As I dug further into the situation, I learned my grantee had inserted code into their website’s robots.txt file which disallowed crawling so no AI engines could access their site. I suggested that they reconsider their position given that this might jeopardize future funding.

After the organization purchased “AI offsets” (carbon-style credits to offset AI energy use) to address their environmental concerns about the use of AI, they followed my advice and removed the offending code. Almost immediately, ChatGPT returned the correct response to the query about the names of the organization’s largest donors.

Following my conversation with this grantee, I learned that they are not an outlier. Resistance to AI is common among leaders of nonprofit organizations. Sadly, these leaders do not realize that this could be costing them donors and hindering their ability to fulfill their mission.

What should donors or board members do to prevent the nonprofits they support or oversee from falling into this trap? I asked Claude AI to give me a list of what it recommends. Here is an edited version of its response:

1.          Visit yournonprofit.org/robots.txt (replace with your organization’s actual domain)

2.          Look for entries like User-agent: GPTBot followed by Disallow: /

3.          Also check entries like ClaudeBot (Anthropic/Claude); CCBot (Common Crawl, used by many AI systems); Google-Extended (Google’s AI training crawler) to see if they are followed by Disallow: /

If you see these lines, your donor information is likely invisible to AI tools.

Step 1: Remove blanket blocks

If your robots.txt file contains lines like:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

This means your entire site is blocked from that AI system. Remove these lines completely or modify them to only block specific sections (like /blog/ or /admin/) while allowing access to public donor pages.

Step 2: Optimize your donor/supporter pages

1.          Create a dedicated “Our Supporters” or “Major Donors” page

2.          List donors in text format, not solely in photos or images (AI cannot reliably read text embedded in images)

3.          Use clear hierarchical structure with proper HTML heading tags (H1, H2, H3) organized by giving level or year

4.          Include the year or period of giving for each donor listing

5.          If possible, use schema.org markup (a standardized system for tagging websites to make them more searchable)

6.          Include donor information in multiple formats (HTML lists, searchable PDFs)

7.          Ensure supporter/donor pages are listed in your website’s sitemap.xml file

*****

The nonprofit organizations which survive will be those which treat AI visibility the way they once treated Google search, as essential infrastructure for reaching donors.

Editor’s Note: As the son of Holocaust survivors, philanthropist Dr. David Milch conceived of the Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated (LEDI) exhibition as a way of using art to inspire us to think about the lost potential of lives destroyed by the Holocaust and other tragedies in human history. His exhibition has now been viewed by thousands in Waltham, Massachusetts, in Jacksonville, Florida, and in Jersey City, New Jersey. He funds the exhibition through his Dr. David M. Milch Foundation, with other philanthropists such as Shari Redstone as partners. I recently interviewed him about his philanthropic approach. Our conversation also addressed the rise of Holocaust inversion, which is the belief that Jews are the new Nazis, as this is something that any donor who funds Holocaust education needs to navigate. - Simone Joy Friedman

Simone Joy Friedman – I am excited to speak to you today because I believe you are a donor who epitomizes the Illuminator Donor Archetype. This Archetype reflects someone who sees an ideal vision for the world where there isn’t strife, there isn’t interpersonal or intersocietal conflict. Donors who approach giving this way support things like the arts, or other types of experiences that bring people together. Your LEDI exhibition – Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated – even has the word “illuminated” in its name! Tell me what you want someone who sees the exhibition to feel and how this relates to your larger philanthropic vision.

Dr. David Milch - You've touched on so many thoughts and ideas and pulses that resonate with me. Thank you for that. And I agree completely, I embrace what you're saying, the concept of illumination. Illumination, wisdom, insight, learning, I mean, these are pillars of what we try to do.

Early on, when I started the family foundation 20 years ago, I sat down and wrote out what the concept was, what my principles were. And, I've always said, wisdom is learning lessons from the past to make decisions in the present better informed so we have healthier outcomes in the future. That's the wisdom umbrella. And one hopes that light shines upon us as we're doing that.

In terms of when we were defining our goals, we looked at two pillars. We do youth mentoring, focusing on youth who, for whatever reason, accident of birth, casino of life, or in circumstances that don't give them the resources, the relationships, the access to opportunities to have a fully realized, fully illuminated, wise life, and try to level the field.

The other is what we call arts for social impact. The LEDI exhibition is [an example of this] that happens to be about Antisemitism and the Holocaust genocide, but extends well beyond that.

The First Tenet of LEDI is that the Holocaust happened, any attempt to deny this reality or dismiss its primacy to the Jewish people is unacceptable and must be resisted. So as a son of two Holocaust survivors, that's my stake in the ground. If you're going to deny the Holocaust, then there's no basis for even having a conversation. You can have different ideas about politics and what the lessons of history are, but if you're going to deny something as fundamental, it's like denying that if I let go of this phone, it's going to hit the floor.

And most reasonable people that we encounter…accept [this] as given. But that's not true for everyone. There is Holocaust denial. So, let's assume that we agree that the Holocaust happened, my stake in the ground. The reality is that the Jews and no individual and no community, no group of people have a corner on the market of suffering.

So that's our Second Tenet of what we're doing with this exhibition. The human story is replete with terrible events affecting individuals and communities. This includes genocide, such as happened during the Holocaust to the Jews, and tragedies throughout history impacting so many innocent victims of war and conflict.

If you've had a tragedy in your own life, in your family or community's life, and you try to go beyond it, learn lessons from it, make better, make wiser decisions, it's important to reach out and realize that other communities, other individuals, have had terrible traumas.  We are not placing slavery, genocide, antisemitism, or racism on a scale. Human suffering is not a competition. What matters is acknowledging both the differences and the common denominators that allow us to develop a dialogue

So that begs the question, how do you facilitate that dialogue? For me, if the Holocaust happened as a trauma in my own personal family and in the Jewish community. And if other communities, the Black community in this country, the Middle Passage, slavery, terrible things have happened, and to many other communities that we can enumerate, how do we develop that dialogue?

And that's the third principle, the Third Tenet of LEDI which connects to what I was saying about arts for social impact. It states that art and artistry provide needed tools and learnings to connect us emotionally to difficult realities like antisemitism, hate, and intolerance, in all forms, past or present, fostering insight and nurturing understanding.

This is a photograph of my mother when she was 16 years old, and this painting shows her with the family that she lost in the Holocaust, and my father's family, and the girls that lost their life in the Holocaust, and these paintings reimagine them. So we're trying to use art and the performances we do, to connect us to difficult periods of history, and very importantly, not just to say, slavery is awful, the Holocaust, how could people do this? What are the lessons? And we have a whole education program, which is what we're working on today that enables us to bring the schools in.

Simone Joy Friedman – I want to ask you about Holocaust inversion, which is an issue that many Jewish donors want to avoid given how deeply troubling it is to see the Holocaust being weaponized against us. As you know, Holocaust inversion is the belief that Israel's fight against Hamas, during which many innocent Gazans were killed, was analogous to the systematic, deliberate Nazi effort to murder every Jew they could find. Sadly, this inversion, which marks Jews as the new Nazis, is widespread on social media. Are you addressing this when students come to see the exhibition?

Dr. David Milch: Well, you've gone right to the third rail of Holocaust education that folks like ourselves are putting curriculum together and going into the schools, and starting from a Jewish perspective, a child of Holocaust survivors perspective [are considering].

We live in a world where information is exploding. Look at what we're doing here. I'm sitting here holding a phone and having this incredible conversation digitally, and the language that people use to communicate ideas is also being compressed by these technologies and required to embrace ideas that are much, much more multifaceted.

I often talk in lectures I do about how the world is both complicated and complex.

[Note from Simone – I wrote about complexity, and its implications for philanthropy, in the December issue of TGR.]

Those are different things, and this relates to the question that you're asking about, because the question about genocide and do you apply it to this circumstance or that circumstance is both complicated, meaning that it has many, many different factors, historical factors, present factors, and it is also complex, meaning it is constantly changing. 

Complicated things have many moving parts, but they stay fixed and with work can be understood. Like a jet engine you can take apart with a blueprint, understand, and reassemble. Complex things are different. They keep rearranging themselves in real time, even as you’re looking at them.

So the issue of genocide, it's complicated, but it has a lot of understandable, or at least documented, historical circumstances. There are principles of how one looks at genocide, so it looks at the Armenian, the Rohingya, the Yazidis, and the Holocaust for Jews.

Now you add the layer of complexity. So we have the situation in the Middle East. We have October 7th, we have post-October 7th, we have Israeli politics outside of Israel, the rest of the world, Gaza, and all the different dimensions.

How does one fit something like a specific word, genocide, into something that has historically so much complication and is evolving this quickly because of technology and information, has such complexities? We're not trying to address that with our exhibition.

For me, [it’s about] having a dialogue about this, which is what the art that's in this room, and what the education program that we're bringing is meant to do, allows these conversations to take place without saying, we're going to figure out exactly where complications and complexities interface. 

Simone Joy Friedman – But for many people, it's not complex. They just assume that the statement that Israelis perpetrated a genocide against Gazans is true because they have heard it repeated so many times, including by leaders whom they respect. And they may not realize that this shuts down dialogue and amplifies those voices who are equating Jews with Nazis. How do you address that?

Dr. David Milch: It’s an oversimplification in which one tries to look at complex things with many moving pieces and look for simple answers. Simplification [leads to] a monolithic way of thinking, and demanding that a solution be imposed that doesn't take [into account] the complexity. But that doesn't mean that one shouldn't have strong opinions, that one shouldn't feel very much moved for the empathy and for a sense of connectedness to one side or the other.

But as soon as one is rigidly adhered to a belief that I know what the answer is, then you're actually contributing to the problem and not engaged in a process that leads to a solution.

Those that are saying it absolutely was a genocide, I would encourage them to come to the table, to come to the circle. Present your perspective, if there's historical insights, if there's numbers, and to be respectful that there's others at the table, in the circle, that look at the same information, or gather the numbers differently, and think differently. There's no simple answer to that without having the dialogue and the communication.

I think for all of us, we have to have the word humility. Enough humility to understand that these are important questions, but we can't be rigid about it. To me, I can respect someone that's on the left. I can respect someone that's on the right. If it's one or two standard deviations, to use a scientific term, from the center of the bell curve, or the center of the circle. But once you get 3, 4, 5 standard deviations, you're getting further and further to the edge and you fall off the edge into darkness. And the further you go to the left, and off the edge, the further you go to the right and off the edge, you end up meeting at the bottom, and it accomplishes nothing.

If there's anything that I would want to hope to accomplish with what we're doing here, is to do what I can to bring people back from the fringes towards some kind of a healthy center. You can be left of center, right of center, but it has to be an intention to come together, otherwise it just becomes extreme, and extremism begets extremism, and that's what, you know, is anathema to the way I think.

Simone Joy Friedman: So when young people see the art, are you hoping that they feel first and learn second, or do you see the feeling and learning as combined, intertwined?

Dr. David Milch: As combined. It's a wonderful point you just made. Yuval Noah Harari, the brilliant Israeli historian and writer who authored Sapiens makes a distinction between consciousness and intelligence. Consciousness is the ability to feel. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. There are many forms of intelligence in the world. There are many forms of consciousness. Consciousness goes back, for the human species, 250, 300,000 years that we've evolved as sapiens. And during that period, we've learned how to solve problems.

The ability to solve problems has exploded in the last hundred years as technology has taken off, but basically, we're the same conscious creatures as the ones that did the cave paintings in Lascaux.

I hope that the students that come to our exhibition share something that we shared with our ancestors 250,000 years ago. They look at a painting and see a woman who’s running through a field with butterflies and sunflowers, and look at the photograph that it's based upon, and that same woman is almost disrobed, and is bleeding, and is being chased, and is about to be beaten to the edge, if not fully losing her life. And people look at this painting and photograph, and they feel something, they feel fear, or they feel a sense of liberation.

And then we begin to talk about, do you notice this part of the painting? Why did the artist make this choice of colors? And they listen to the music that's been composed to [go along with] it. How does the music reflect the painting? And suddenly, there's this magic dyadic cyclone that takes place between what they're feeling emotionally and whatever that individual brings to that experience, and [they] begin to automatically make judgments. And if the judgments are informed by good experiences, they're healthy judgments. If they're formed by difficult experiences that you bring into that encounter, you do prejudgment or prejudice.

We want our exhibition to encourage healthy judgment, and then to talk about the circumstances of this particular girl, and the lessons of what happened to this Jewish woman that happened because of antisemitism and the Holocaust genocide. And then we begin to talk about what can you do?

Simone Joy Friedman: I know that your permanent exhibition is in Jersey City, New Jersey, but tell me about what you are doing in Jacksonville, Florida.

Dr. David Milch: Jacksonville is where we have our main traveling exhibition. And in Jacksonville, Florida, the majority of the public school population happens to be students of color, from varied economic backgrounds. We had such great interest from schools that sometimes we had to bring classes in over multiple days, and split students into multiple groups while onsite. We offered programming from classes as small as 15 to groups as large as 150 at a time. And the kinds of conversations that came out of that, and the art program and the exercises that were done, besides talking about the paintings and listening to the music and the lectures, are extraordinary.

These are 12 to 16-year-olds. And then they go back and they tell their parents, and their parents come in and say, what's this exhibition that my daughter is talking about? And we have that dialogue with the adults.

So yes, we want people to come in and feel things, feel connected. This young girl in this photograph, her life reimagined in this painting. Could have been my sister, could have been my cousin, could have been my mother. And they feel that, and then they're receptive to the actual historical facts, and the dialogue that goes from there. At the core of it, what we want students to take away besides the three tenets is, how can I act in my life to be an upstander and not a bystander. To be an upstander in life.

Simone Joy Friedman – So are you planning to take it to other cities?

Dr. David Milch – We can't take what we have in Jacksonville, so easily into any location. So we made a reduced footprint LEDI-in-a-Box, and we're going to make about a dozen of those, and send them out. We want to be in Nashville, we want to be in Memphis, we want to be in Spokane, we want to be in Dallas. 

Now, Dallas-Fort Worth, we may do a full exhibition. There's a strong Jewish community, and they see the importance of this kind of an exhibition, and our education program meets the Holocaust and genocide education standards that 30 states in the United States have passed.

In fact, in Jacksonville, Florida, we built the Holocaust and Genocide education program for Duval County Public Schools, a school district of 120,000 students, and it now serves as the district’s official curriculum. This year, in 2026, we estimate 15,000 to 16,000 8th and 9th graders will get their education on this, and as part of that, they're required to visit the exhibition.

So we want to go into areas where there has to be local support with  relationships with the education community. We partner with a lead ambassador in each community, [such as] a local foundation. We can send them the two cargo cases that [LEDI-in-a-Box] gets packed up in, at no cost. They have to staff it locally, but we'll train them. They then have it available for a week to four weeks. We can do Zoom education. If they want a more extended residency, or they want a more full exhibition, we sit down and talk about it. This lowers barriers to access by eliminating cost as an obstacle so local communities can take ownership of and lead the experience in ways that resonate with them.

Simone Joy Friedman – Ultimately, what are you trying to achieve?

Dr. David Milch - The fastest and most destructive way to get someone's attention is to sow fear and anxiety, and to get that dopamine and all of these signals going on, and to get you hooked. To break that, [you have to] short circuit, while reinforcing common ground. [Promoting] humanism takes an act of conscious, willful commitment to building bridges and reinforcing them. 

You do the best you can with the tools you have. So, that's the illumination, that's the light that, if I have the opportunity to spread, I'm grateful to be able to do so.

Simone Joy Friedman: That’s fantastic – you articulated precisely what an Illuminator does and what you’re trying to build with LEDI. Thank you for speaking with me.

Note: This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Cause: DIY Girls

Using engaging, hands-on STEAM experiences, DIY Girls makes engineering and technology accessible and relevant for girls and gender-expansive youth in under-resourced communities. To address a critical gap where women comprise only 34% of the STEM workforce, and women of color just 10%, DIY Girls delivers a holistic pipeline of mentor-led programs. From Creative Electronics in 5th grade through Invent Girls in high school, these programs combine technical creativity and skills with social-emotional learning to bridge the confidence gap and reignite their passion and perseverance. To date, 100% of seniors have enrolled in college, and 66% of alumni graduates earned degrees in STEM fields.