Intelligence
with roots.
Practical, culturally grounded artificial intelligence for Black and Afro-Indigenous life, business, land and community.
Working with an organisation? Work with Heirloom Praxis
It did not ask
for permission.
- Work
- Education
- Farming
- Media
- Health information
- Government
- Finance
- Communication
- Culture
What we are not saying
That this is inevitable and you should get on board. Plenty of the right answers here are “no”, “not for that”, and “not with our people’s information”. Refusal is a governance decision too, and it is one you can only make well if you understand what you are refusing.
So the question is not whether we will use it. The questions worth our time are these four.
Who understands it?
Usage is already high in our communities. Understanding is not the same thing, and the gap between them is where people get taken.
Who governs it?
Nearly half of nonprofits surveyed in 2026 had no AI policy at all. Somebody is deciding how these systems get used. It should be the people they get used on.
Who owns what gets built?
Accounts, data, documentation and configuration are all ownable. Most people find out they do not own them at the worst possible moment.
Who benefits?
Efficiency has to land somewhere. If nobody decides where, it gets absorbed and nothing changes for the people doing the work.
Not that you use AI. That you hold every power over it.
To help Afro-Indigenous communities build, power, govern, protect, repair, and economically benefit from local artificial intelligence systems aligned with land, culture, ecological responsibility, community ownership, and future generations.
Energy sovereignty
If the grid goes down, does it still run?
Data sovereignty
Who holds what it knows?
Governance sovereignty
Who can switch it off?
There is a ladder, and most people are already on the bottom rung
Level 0 is paying a subscription for a service you do not control. It is not neutral ground — it is a position with a recurring cost and a dependency already attached. The work is the climb, and every rung needs its governance built before its technology.
- 0Cloud dependentRecurring, unbounded
- 1Offline reference library$50–$300
- 2Single-device offline AI$600–$1,500
- 3Shared local network$1,500–$4,000
- 4Renewable-powered community node$4,000–$12,000
- 5Distributed cooperative network$15,000–$50,000+
- 6Regional sovereign infrastructure$50,000–$250,000+
- 7Global diaspora intelligence commonsHighly variable
This website is a Level 0 system. It runs on commercial cloud hosting. It is a doorway to the work, not an example of it, and we would rather say so here than let the design imply otherwise.
And a list of things we will not build
The clearest test of whether any of this is real. A company that installs systems for a living cannot usually afford to publish the installations it refuses.
Knowledge systems
Most community knowledge problems do not need AI at all.
Sacred and sensitive material
Some knowledge should never be digitised at all.
Controlled-environment agriculture
Humidity, temperature, CO₂, lighting and irrigation timing are thermostat problems, not machine-learning problems.
28 more, each with its reason and its source.
None of this requires you to want a solar-powered server. Most people who use this site will never need one. But the aim shapes what we teach, what we refuse, and who ends up owning what gets built — so it belongs on the front page rather than in an about page.
What do you need to build?
“I want to understand this without being sold something.”
Start with what the technology actually is, what it genuinely does well, and the things it gets confidently wrong. No prerequisites.
What you get
- Plain-language foundations
- What AI cannot do, in writing
- Privacy and surveillance basics
- AI for the Village workshop
Not sure which one? The Opportunity Map will sort it out in about eight minutes.
The tool shed
AI Opportunity Map
Find where this technology is actually worth your time.
- Time needed
- ~10 min
- Uses a language model
- Uses AI
- Personal data collected
- Your answers only
Crop Planner
Plan beds, successions and harvest windows for a real growing season.
- Time needed
- ~10 min
- Uses a language model
- No AI — fixed rules
- Personal data collected
- Your answers only
Land Access Navigator
Reason through the routes to land, and prepare before you walk in.
- Time needed
- ~12 min
- Uses a language model
- Uses AI
- Personal data collected
- Your answers only
Community Organizing Tool
Map the people, plan the campaign, run the meeting.
- Time needed
- ~12 min
- Uses a language model
- Uses AI
- Personal data collected
- Your answers only
Sovereign System Builder
Design a system where the important decisions stay yours.
- Time needed
- ~12 min
- Uses a language model
- Uses AI
- Personal data collected
- Your answers only
Time and Capacity Calculator
What is repetitive work costing you?
- Time needed
- ~5 min
- Uses a language model
- No AI — fixed rules
- Personal data collected
- Your answers only
Rooted AI Workflow Builder
What work keeps repeating, and how should it actually flow?
- Time needed
- ~7 min
- Uses a language model
- No AI — fixed rules
- Personal data collected
- Your answers only
Heirloom Shield Scanner
Should this information go into AI?
- Time needed
- ~4 min
- Uses a language model
- No AI — fixed rules
- Personal data collected
- Your answers only
Heirloom Shield Self-Assessment
A reflective assessment across seven domains of sovereignty. Not a certification.
- Time needed
- ~15 min
- Uses a language model
- No AI — fixed rules
- Personal data collected
- Your answers only
Community Resource Navigator
A checked, dated directory — not a search engine guess.
- Time needed
- ~3 min
- Uses a language model
- No AI — fixed rules
- Personal data collected
- Collects nothing
Why these are free
Because a person who can plan their own season, prepare their own land questions, or run their own governance review should not have to buy that from us first. Some of you will hire us afterwards. Most of you will not, and that is a working outcome.
AI for
the Village
Practical Intelligence for Black Life, Business & Land
Two to three hours in a room together. You bring whatever device you have and whatever you have been wondering. We work through it in public, in plain language, with the failures shown rather than hidden.
What you learn
- What these systems actually are, in plain language
- Where they help, with your own work as the example
- Where they fail, demonstrated live rather than described
- What should never be typed into one
- One thing you can use on Monday
Who it serves
- Business owners
- Farmers and growers
- Nonprofit staff
- Organisers
- Artists and makers
- Elders
- Young people
- Anyone who has been putting this off
Tickets $35–$95 on a sliding scale. Sponsored seats at every session — ask, and you will not be asked to prove anything.
Upcoming sessions
No session is scheduled yet.
How Heirloom Praxis helps
Learn
Workshops, guides, and the Academy as it opens.
Start from nothing and end up able to judge this technology for yourself. Everything written here is free and stays free.
Build
Systems, workflows and tools, scoped and documented.
We find the work worth handing over, build it once, properly, and hand you the accounts, the documentation and the training.
Organize
Governance, knowledge and community infrastructure.
Policy your board can adopt, knowledge that survives a staff change, and a say for the people your work actually lands on.
For businesses
Get the hours back. Keep the craft.
A readiness assessment that examines your capacity as honestly as your opportunities. A documented Blueprint you own. An implementation with a fixed scope and a fixed fee.
- AI Readiness Assessment
- Heirloom Blueprint
- Heirloom Systems Build
- Training for the people who will run it
For organizations
Your staff already use it. Nobody wrote the policy.
In a 2026 benchmark study of 346 nonprofits, 92% reported using AI and 7% reported major impact, with 47% holding no governance policy at all. Governance is the gap, and governance is closable.
- An AI use policy your board can adopt
- Role-differentiated staff training
- Documented workflows that survive turnover
- A data review covering the people you serve
Work, land, and the
people doing it
Every picture on this site is a photograph from our own archive: the gardens, grow rooms and build sites this work comes out of, and the places it has travelled. None of it is stock and none of it is generated. Each one is labelled with where and when it was made and who made it, and where we do not know, the label says so.
HP-A-023
Framing the beds
Place unrecorded2020
Photograph · Photographer unrecorded
HP-A-012
The Old Fort
Stone Town, Zanzibar2021
Photograph · Photographer unrecorded
HP-A-004
Sample slab, earthen build
Trinidad2025
Photograph · Photographer unrecorded
HP-A-006
Blue oyster, first flush
New Haven, Connecticut2026
Photograph · Photographer unrecorded
HP-A-010
Cacao, on the branch
Costa Rica2022
Photograph · Photographer unrecorded
HP-A-015
Harbour, sun going down
Place unrecorded2021
Photograph · Photographer unrecorded
Photographs of other people are hung only with their permission. Until those are gathered, these walls hold land, harvest, material and the founder, and the pictures of the people we work alongside stay in the drawer.
Frameworks, published openly
framework
The Heirloom Shield: Seven Domains of Sovereignty
A governance framework covering human, data, cultural, economic, creative, community and ecological sovereignty. Published openly, usable without us, and explicitly not a certification.
2 named sources
framework
The Heirloom Method
How we work: harvest what exists, examine it, imagine better, root every decision in people and governance, layer technology thinly, operationalise it, transfer ownership, then multiply.
framework
What an AI Policy Covers
Ten sections, three depths, and what goes wrong when each one is missing. A one-page use guide is not a policy with sections deleted — it answers six of the ten in a line each, and the other four by ordinary practice. Rendered from the same framework the policy builder enforces.
framework
How We Measure, and What We Refuse to Claim
The measurement framework, published before there is anything to measure. Six levels a number can sit at, the alternatives we cannot rule out, and the two claim levels nothing here currently reaches. Rendered from the same registry the code enforces, so the published method cannot drift from the applied one.
essay
The Governance Gap: What the 2026 Adoption Data Actually Shows
Adoption is nearly universal and impact is nearly absent. A reading of published 2026 benchmark data on why the bottleneck is governance and ownership rather than access to tools — with every figure attributed to its named source.
2 named sources
State of Black AI — pilot report
Planned — Year 2Our first piece of original research. It will not be published until it has a defined sample, a disclosed methodology and outside review, because a report without those things is an advertisement wearing a lab coat. Planned for Year 2.
The Heirloom Builders Circle
We are running paid workshops and engagements first, and the Circle opens once there is a cohort with something real to compare notes about. A membership community with nothing behind it is a room people quietly leave, and we would rather build it late than build it hollow.
What the founding cohort gets
- Founding pricing, held for as long as you stay
- A say in what the Circle actually becomes
- First access to new tools and curriculum
- Other people building the same kind of thing
Joining the waitlist costs nothing and commits you to nothing. We will write once, when it opens.
One more thing
The future should remember us
because we helped build it.
We have always built systems. We have always carried knowledge across generations that tried to interrupt it. This is another technology entering that lineage, and we intend to understand it, shape it, govern it, and make sure what it produces reaches our people.
Or just read something free and decide later.