A Seed Grant Grows Humane Education

“Can AI-supported humane education spark enough curiosity to make it more engaging in a technology-centered world?” Julielani Chang, founder of The Life of Kai: Compassion Connections Inc., has spent the past year testing that question, one narrated story at a time. Chang built her nonprofit around BK, a rescued community cat whose life became the seed for a growing library of humane education stories, and with support from The Pollination Project, that seed grew into Kai’s Kindness Library, a free digital storytelling project reaching children, families, and educators around the world.

Chang came to this work with a background in humane education and animal behavior, not in video production or digital media. Her vision was simple, use storytelling to teach children empathy, compassion, and kindness toward animals, and use whatever tools were available to reach as many young minds as possible. What she needed was a way to turn that vision into content children would actually want to watch, and that is where the seed grant made its mark.

The Pollination Project’s funding gave Life of Kai the resources to build something it could not have built alone, a sustainable workflow for producing narrated humane education videos using Canva, Synthesia, and YouTube. Grant funds covered a Synthesia subscription and a student internship, together forming the foundation of the entire project.

“The internship supported by The Pollination Project gave us the opportunity to test different tools and workflows while creating engaging, child-friendly narrated content,” Chang shared in her grant report.

What began as a plan to create 15 narrated stories became a library of 30 videos and counting, each one exploring themes of kindness, empathy, adoption, and coexistence with animals through the eyes of a real community cat.

The numbers tell part of the story. Life of Kai’s project directly impacted 40 people and 15 animals during the grant period, figures the organization calculated conservatively, counting only the student intern, humane education collaborators, authors, partner organizations, veterinarians, pre-vet student volunteers, and the community cats and companion animals connected to the storytelling work. Volunteers contributed 250 hours to bring the library to life, entirely unpaid, since Life of Kai runs on volunteer power alone. The project also opened doors to new partnerships with organizations including RedRover, Ohlone Humane Society, Lakes Animal Friendship Society, and Kitty Kotor, the latter now exploring a Montenegrin translation of selected stories, a first step toward the multilingual, cross-cultural reach Chang envisions for humane education content.

What makes Kai’s Kindness Library remarkable is that its impact did not stop when the grant funding did. The workflow, templates, and systems developed during the internship continue to support new story production today, and Life of Kai has since secured additional funding from the Swingle Foundation to expand its programming further. The project earned local media coverage through the Davis Enterprise’s Pet Tales column, and Ohlone Humane Society has begun sharing selected videos through its own channels. Chang sees this as only the beginning.

“We believe the same soft-spoken AI narrator can create familiarity and trust while short visual stories and relatable animal characters help sustain engagement over time,” she explained, drawing a comparison to the comfort generations of children found in familiar, predictable storytelling.

For Chang, the seed grant did more than fund software and an internship, it validated an unconventional idea and gave a small, volunteer-run nonprofit the freedom to experiment with technology in service of compassion.

As she put it in her report, “The Pollination Project gave us the freedom to explore, adapt, and grow an unconventional idea,” one that is already reshaping how humane education reaches children, families, and communities far beyond Davis, California.

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