Putting AI to work for the public good.
Backland Impact brings together partner organizations, domain experts, and technical talent to solve real problems with AI — and to help the nonprofits and community organizations doing the work build that capability for themselves.
Our mission.
Civic and social impact organizations are sitting on decades of expertise, hard-won relationships, and deep knowledge of the problems they were built to solve. What many of them lack is the capacity to explore what AI now makes possible.
Backland Impact exists to close that gap — not as a consultancy, but as a community. We bring together partner organizations, domain experts, and technical talent to solve real problems with AI, and to help the nonprofits and community organizations closest to the work build that capability for themselves.
It takes a community.
Real solutions to public problems come from three groups working in the same room:
Partner organizations
Cities, agencies, nonprofits, and community groups that know which problems matter — and bring the real data and context to ground the work.
Domain experts
People who have lived inside these systems and understand the constraints, the edge cases, and what has already been tried.
Technical talent
AI engineers and builders who turn that knowledge into working solutions, fast.
We bring them together through Impact Labs, then keep the most promising work moving long after — so the nonprofits and community organizations closest to the work come away more capable of using AI on their own.
Built for the people closest to the problem.
If you work in city government, public health, housing, education, criminal justice, environmental policy, or any mission-driven organization where hard problems persist, this is for you. You don't need a technical background. You need the expertise you already have.
AI is a powerful accelerant, but it doesn't know what to solve. That takes people who have lived inside these systems, who understand the edge cases, and who know which approaches have already been tried. The community brings the technical builders and the structured process. You bring the knowledge that makes the output worth building.
Where we started.
The inaugural Claude Impact Lab, run in partnership with the City of San Diego and sponsored by Anthropic, brought 60 participants together to tackle challenges across public safety, permitting, government accountability, and municipal services. The event produced 28 project submissions in a single day, with the strongest projects now advancing through a structured follow-on program.
It proved a model: give the right people the right tools and a focused problem, and real solutions emerge fast.
60
Participants
28
Project submissions
1
Day
Who we are.
Backland Impact was founded by Max Krueger out of a conviction that the gap between AI capability and civic outcomes is not a technology problem. It is a coordination problem. The expertise already exists. The builders are ready. What has been missing is the structure to bring them together around problems that matter and keep the work going after the energy of a single event fades.
Max has led AI engineering efforts at Accenture and Casper Studios, founded the AI Tinkerers San Diego chapter, and has spent 6+ years building production AI systems. That builder community is one half of the equation. The organizations and domain experts who show up to tackle real challenges are the other.