The Giveback
The grey shirt is just a shirt. It is what it means on a bad day that matters.
I have been a Grey Shirt with Team Rubicon for about a decade — veterans and first responders who show up after the storm, muck out the flooded houses, and cut the trees off the roads. You learn a few things doing that work. One is that capability shows up unevenly. The help arrives where somebody knew who to call.
That is the part of this business I think about most, and it is why the giveback exists.
Here is how it works. For every 12 hours of paid coaching, you earn a free coaching session that goes to a nonprofit — and you pick which one. Twelve hours is twelve sessions at Foundations, or ten sessions at Builder. I reach out, set it up, and you are welcome to sit in if you like. It needs to be a 501(c)(3), and past that the choice is genuinely yours — food banks, schools, libraries, arts organizations, tribal organizations, disaster relief. You name the one that matters to you and I go.
No nonprofit in mind? Those hours roll into my own volunteer work instead.
The reason is plainer than it sounds. AI skills are moving fast, and they are landing first with the people and organizations who already had the most: the ones with a budget line for training, someone whose job is tools, and time to sit and learn. Meanwhile the food bank coordinator is doing four jobs, the school librarian is doing six, and the volunteer disaster-response team is coordinating with whatever is on somebody's phone.
Those are exactly the places where a few hours of the right help compounds. Not because AI is going to fix anything on its own — it is a tool, and a tool needs someone who knows what they are doing — but because an afternoon spent building one honest workflow can give a two-person organization back a whole day a month. A day a month is real. It is more real than most of what gets claimed for this technology.
I am not doing this at scale, and I want to be honest about that rather than dress it up. This is one person, working nights and days off, with a background in hospitality and a habit of volunteering. The giveback is not a foundation or a program. It is a rule I set for myself so the growth of this practice pulls something along behind it, instead of just accumulating.
There is a selfish part too, and I would rather name it than pretend. Nonprofits are the best possible teachers about what actually helps. They have no patience for a demo. They will tell you inside ten minutes whether the thing you built saves them any real time, and they are right — which makes them the fastest way I know to find out what is genuinely useful and what only looks useful.
AI skills shouldn't only land with the people who can already afford them. I cannot do much about that on my own. This is what I can do, so this is what I do.
That is the tour. If any of this resonated, the first step is always the same: a free call.
Read how the giveback works here: The Giveback →
Or text 503-664-0546.
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