Let me start with something I’m fairly sure is true about your organisation, even though we may never have met.

Someone on your team has used AI this week. Maybe they asked a chatbot to tidy up a funding bid. Maybe a volunteer used it to summarise a long set of notes, or to word a tricky email more gently. They probably didn’t mention it. They almost certainly didn’t think they were doing anything that needed mentioning.

That’s the thing about AI in community work. It didn’t arrive with an announcement. It just quietly turned up, one helpful shortcut at a time.

And yet, when I talk to small charities, hubs, and community groups, hardly any of them have an AI policy. Not because they don’t care, these are some of the most careful, values-driven people I know. It’s because the words “AI policy” sound like they belong to a corporation with a legal department and a compliance team. For an organisation already doing three jobs with one pair of hands, it lands as one more impossible thing on a list that’s already too long. So it gets quietly moved to “later.”

The trouble is, AI doesn’t wait for later.

The risk isn’t the technology. It’s everyone guessing on their own.

When there’s no agreed approach, every person makes their own call, in the moment, with nothing to guide them. One volunteer pastes a service user’s personal details into a free tool, not realising where that information goes. A staff member sends out something an AI wrote that nobody quite checked. Nobody meant any harm. They were trying to help, and they were doing their best with no map.

That’s the real issue. Not robots, not science fiction. Just good people making inconsistent decisions because no one has had the conversation out loud.

And in our world, digital inclusion, that matters more than most. The people we support need to know they are safe with us. Trust is the whole foundation of the work. An AI policy isn’t red tape. It’s part of how you keep that trust.

And no, a downloaded template won’t fix it

I know what the internet suggests: grab a ready-made AI policy, swap in your logo, job done.

Except we both know how that ends. A policy borrowed from a tech firm or a giant charity doesn’t fit a small community organisation, and everyone can feel it. It speaks a language your team doesn’t use. It worries about things you’ll never face and stays silent on the things you deal with every day. So it goes in a folder, unread, protecting no one. A policy nobody understands isn’t protection. It’s just paperwork.

What you actually need is the opposite of that. Something short. Something in plain words. Something that sounds like your organisation, that a brand-new volunteer could read on their first morning and genuinely follow.

Here’s the part that surprises people

Writing a policy that fits you is far more within reach than it sounds.

You don’t need to be a lawyer. You don’t need a technical background. You don’t need to understand what’s happening inside the machine. The most important thing is already in the room with you: your values, your understanding of the people you serve, and a clear way to turn those into something your whole team can stand behind.

That last part, turning what you already believe into a policy that actually works, is the bit people get stuck on. It’s also the bit we love helping with.