Why a recovery nonprofit in Windham is one of Ohio's best AI stories

Most AI stories start in Silicon Valley. One of my favorites starts in Windham, Ohio, a small village in Portage County.

That's where Hope Town Ohio has spent years helping people rebuild their lives after addiction, with recovery housing, rides to work, jobs and peer support. It's also where a small nonprofit team decided, before most organizations its size, that AI was going to change the way they work, and that they'd better learn it themselves before teaching anyone else.

This week, at the Toledo AI Summit during Great Lakes AI Week, I shared that I'm joining the Hope Town AI Advisory Board. Here's why I said yes.

They built it for themselves first

Hope Town didn't start with a strategy deck. It started with a problem every lean nonprofit knows: too much paperwork, not enough hours, and staff who were wary of the word "AI." So the team put AI to work inside its own operations, from a virtual receptionist to automations that hand time back to the people doing the real work, and trained its staff along the way.

Once it worked for them, they opened the doors. Hope Town began offering AI classes with partners like AI OWL, and in September it hosted an AI town hall in Windham that brought behavioral health and recovery leaders from across the state to talk about the guardrails this technology needs.

Now it's Hope Town AI

That work has grown into Hope Town AI, which helps behavioral health, recovery, workforce and nonprofit organizations across Ohio make AI practical and ethical. The approach is refreshingly direct:

• Assess where an organization really stands with an AI readiness audit
• Strategize a roadmap and a governance framework that fits the people it serves
• Implement the agents and automations, then hand them to the team to run

The Hope Town AI Academy adds 12 sessions across three tracks, including one built for people who are usually left out of these conversations: AI for the Underserved and Underemployed.

Why this matters for the age of intelligence

I spend a lot of my time on where AI is heading, toward systems that will outperform experts across most domains. That future will be decided as much by who gets an on-ramp as by who builds the models. If the only organizations ready for it are big companies on the coasts, we will have failed the people and places that need it most.

Hope Town is proof that it doesn't have to go that way. A recovery nonprofit in a small Ohio village is running AI inside its own operations, teaching others to do the same and insisting that people stay at the center. That's the kind of leadership I want to help scale.

The company I'll be keeping

The board brings together people I admire from recovery, behavioral health, public policy and technology, including State Representative Heidi Workman of the Technology and Innovation Committee; Lori Criss, former Director of the Ohio Department of Behavioral Health; Teresa Lampl of the Ohio Council of Behavioral Health & Family Service Providers; Alisha Nelson of the OneOhio Foundation; and AI governance leader Nicole Jackson of Optimum Technology. See the full advisory board.

My role is to help connect Hope Town AI's work to the statewide and national programs, standards and convenings we run at ETA, from AI Week to the US AI Congress at the National Press Club on March 24-25, 2027.

If you lead a behavioral health, recovery, workforce or nonprofit organization in Ohio and you're wondering where to start with AI, start with Hope Town AI. And if you want to talk about what comes next, find me at an AI Week near you or reach out at zackhuhn.com.

Zack Huhn is Chief SuperIntelligence Officer of the Enterprise Technology Association (ETA) and Executive Director of the US AI Congress.