Project summary

The Waterloo AI Association (WAIA, website: https://waia.ca/) is a student-run AI safety and governance organization based at Wilfrid Laurier University, serving students from Laurier, the University of Waterloo, and Conestoga College in the Waterloo region.

I founded WAIA in January 2026 and officially launched on March 11. In the six months since we’ve recruited a co-founder and six executives, built out a website, Discord, LinkedIn, and Instagram, run 5 events, and registered 22 members. We have done all this on volunteer time and with no institutional funding. To date we have covered the costs ourselves.

Canada’s highest concentration of tech talent is in the Waterloo region. The University of Waterloo alone generates more students in software and machine learning roles than any other Canadian school, and its co-op pipeline gets students inside frontier labs and AI startups before they graduate. Currently, there is no organized AI safety presence filling that pipeline. Toronto has one. Vancouver has one. We have no budget. Waterloo arguably produces more of the people who will build these systems than either.

We are raising $2,000 to $5,000 to run the WAIA Fellowship: an 8-week, BlueDot-style introduction to AI safety and AI governance, and the speaker events and outreach that feed it. This is a small ask for a concrete, measurable output: two cohorts of students who have worked through a structured AI safety curriculum and know what it looks like to have a career in the field.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

Goal 1: Provide two WAIA Fellowship Cohorts of 12-20 students (Fall 2026 and Winter 2027).

The Fellowship is an 8-week program, modelled after BlueDot Impact, with one curated reading per week and one 90-minute facilitated discussion. No technical background is required. The application, rubric, and scoring criteria are already developed. That’s by design, as the region is also home to students at Laurier, UWaterloo, and Conestoga colleges, and professionals who don’t go to school. A regional program makes a regional community, and it doesn’t go away when one graduating class leaves.

We do this by conducting the intake we’ve already designed, recruiting facilitators from our existing exec team, and paying for the room, the readings, and the food that makes people actually show up.

Goal 2: Host 4-6 open events that convert curiosity into fellowship applications.

Introduction to the alignment workshop, AI safety career panel, and speaker talks. Our first target is MATS scholars, followed by Astra Fellows and Anthropic Research Fellows. They are responsive, they like to talk about their work, and it’s a win-win. Typically we run these virtually in a classroom projection, which keeps costs near zero and reaches wide. Funding includes honorariums, room logistics, and food.

Goal 3: Make WAIA the AI Safety Hub for the Waterloo Region, not just for a campus.

We are already federating with AI safety groups at UBC, the University of Toronto, and UW-Madison. We're talking to the UofT group about a possible Ontario student organizer meetup. “The funding supports travel for joint programming and hosting organizers from other Ontario schools.

Measurable outcomes at the end of the grant period:

• 8-week fellowship run with 2 cohorts of 24-40 students

• 4-6 open events run, and attendance tracked at each

• At least 3 graduates of the fellowship move on to a next step: facilitating a cohort, joining exec, applying to BlueDot or ARENA, or applying to an AI safety internship or fellowship.

• WAIA still exists in April 2027 with a leadership team that is not dependent on me personally

How will this funding be used?

The full budget assumes the maximum. At the minimum we run one cohort instead of two and cut travel.

At $5,000 (maximum):

• Fellowship programming, 2 cohorts: $1,600 (Room and AV, printed reading packets, food for 16 sessions at roughly $60 per session)

• Speaker events and career panel: $1,400 (4 honorariums at $150, plus event food and logistics at roughly $200 per event)

• Outreach and recruitment: $800 (Posters and QR flyers, tabling materials for the Laurier and UWaterloo club fairs, basic merch for exec visibility, mailing list tooling)

• Regional travel and federation: $900 (GO Train and transit for joint sessions with the UofT group, plus hosting an Ontario student organizer meetup)

• Contingency: $300 (Absorbs venue fees and cost overruns without killing an event)

Total: $5,000

At $2,000 (minimum):

• Fellowship programming, 1 cohort: $800

• Speaker events and career panel: $600

• Outreach and recruitment: $350

• Regional travel and federation: $250

Total: $2,000

None of this money goes to me or any executive. All dollars go to programming, materials, or travel. Our operating philosophy is lean; we run world-class small-org tooling out of Google Drive and a free Notion tier, and we’d rather spend on the things that put students in a room than infrastructure.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

Kylie Cruz, Founder and President: Computer Science (Honours), 2nd Year Wilfrid Laurier University. Founded WAIA in January 2026, building it from scratch to a public launch, eight-person leadership team, and 22 members within six months. Laurier Computing Society Outreach Coordinator. ML Data Specialist (Former Intern) at AMX Research Lab. Completed BlueDot Impact’s Future of AI course. Developed a set of short videos and games that teach the difference between AI safety and AI ethics (which we use in our own programming)

King Dixon, Co-Founder & Vice President: Hired within 2 weeks of our public launch.

Executive team: Hired six additional executives in Finance, Technical, AI Safety, AI Governance, Marketing and Outreach through a structured application and interview process with a written rubric. There is a documented handbook for each role and a coordinator pathway underneath, so the org has a succession plan instead of a single point of failure.

Advisor: Tzu Kit Chan (Chief of Staff, Atlas Computing) has advised WAIA from early in its life and continues to be our primary outside sounding board. Our operating plan for April through August, our decision-making framework, and our approach to speaker outreach all emerged directly from those conversations.

Track record on similar projects:

• Founded and built an organization from scratch in less than three months

• Hired and onboarded eight leadership team members through a real hiring process

• We ran five events in the first semester

• Built and launched the full infrastructure stack (website, Discord w/ compliance-grade member records, Instagram, LinkedIn, member registration, and team application pipelines)

• Built an operations playbook that included exec roles, meeting cadence, decision frameworks, event runbooks, and compliance requirements, which is the thing most student groups never do and the reason most of them die in year two

• Establish federation relationships with AI safety groups at UBC, UofT, and UW-Madison

We haven't done a multi-week, structured cohort program yet. That is exactly what this funding is for, and that is why the ask is small; we are not asking to be funded for the whole vision, we are asking to be funded for the next step.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

Most likely cause: fellowship attrition. The standard failure mode for a first cohort is 20 apply, 15 accept, and 6 finish. We’ve specifically designed the intake to accommodate this scenario. The application asks directly about the 8-week commitment, about known conflicts such as midterms and co-op terms, and about all workable time slots rather than a single preference. We want to have a smaller cohort of people that actually complete than a large one that decays. If attrition does hit us, we end up with a smaller completed cohort, not a wasted grant.

Second cause: my own capacity. I'm a full-time 2nd-year student. Sometimes my programming slows down when my course load, a co-op term, or an internship squeezes my time. That’s why there’s a coordinator layer below each exec role as a mitigation: our AI Safety and AI Governance execs co-own the Fellowship, not just me. The fact is this org is still founder heavy, and one of my explicit goals for this grant period is to reduce that dependency.

Third cause: institutional friction. Our Wilfrid Laurier club registration was turned down, so no university room bookings, no Students’ Union account, and no institutional funding. We are now operating as an independent student organization. This situation is survivable and in some ways liberating, as an independent org can serve UWaterloo and Conestoga students without having to seek approval for every cross-campus collaboration. However, it means we pay for rooms we would otherwise obtain for free, and it’s part of our need for outside funding altogether. We will reapply for registration, and if successful, this reduces our costs and does not complicate this grant.

What failure really looks like: the downside here is minor and cheap. The money could support a couple of well-run events and a Discord community that exists but doesn’t grow. No one is harmed. The bad realistic outcome is that we produce 12 fellowship graduates instead of 40 in a region where there are no current fellows.

What the upside looks like: a ton of people in the Waterloo region are shipped into ML engineering roles every year, and right now they basically never run into AI safety as a serious field before they get there. A handful of students that take a formal program and take those questions into a lab or policy role is a good return on $5,000.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

$0 in external funding.

WAIA has raised nothing. I have personally covered all costs to date, roughly $260 since January 2026.

We pursued two funding paths this year, and both closed:

1. Kairos Pathfinder Fellowship (Fall 2026). Applied in the spring with a written application and video component. Rejected in August 2026. The rejection was not about the strength of the group. Their stated reason was limited mentor capacity.

2. Wilfrid Laurier Students' Union club funding. Our club registration application was submitted on July 15, 2026, and denied, which closes off Students' Union budget requests, room bookings, and event funding for this year.

This Manifund application is our first external grant request and currently our only live funding path.