Lion Institute

Our Why

The American Dream is fraying. The pillars that once made middle-class life attainable – affordable health care, quality education, competitive work – have eroded under decades of rising costs and stagnant wages. This is the great challenge of our time.

That challenge will require a multifaceted response, and technology has a central role to play. Throughout history, tech has propelled American families forward. Electricity transformed household labor and hygiene, penicillin eradicated disease, and the internet connected entrepreneurs from Mississippi to New York City.

We are now living through another great leap: the dawn of artificial intelligence. It has the power to ease the mental health crisis, give every child a world-class tutor, and power a future with abundant housing and clean energy.

But it’s not guaranteed that these benefits will reach the median American family. Many of America’s most important institutions lack the capacity and strategic plan to shape these tools around the needs of all families. And trust has collapsed: skepticism of technology, and of the people building it, runs rampant. The risk is that this hardens into a politics that rejects technological progress altogether.

The Lion Institute exists to shape emerging technologies to reinforce the American Dream and to prove that these innovations can transform health, education, and work for all families.

What We Do

The Lion Institute leads high-impact pilots that shape cutting-edge technologies around the core needs of American families. We work on the critical issues at the center of American life – healthcare, education, workforce, and energy – and bring together the stakeholders needed to solve them: leading founders and technology companies, universities and health systems, community partners, and local, state, and federal government.

For each pilot, we identify a problem, match it with a technology partner, recruit implementation partners, and measure outcomes. We are the AI implementation partner for public institutions. Each pilot demonstrates, through its own specific use case, how tech can improve everyday life for the median family in the ways that matter most. We then share those lessons with the world.

How We Work

We work with major foundations and private technology companies to fund our mission. We help these partners source, vet, implement, and report on the programs they want to see in the world.

For our pilot partners, we provide access to resources and expert support to help design pilots that can scale. We also act as a trusted intermediary between major technology companies and the institutions, communities, and governments doing the work.

Technology Partners

• AI labs & model developers
• Founders & startups
• Technology companies

Implementation Partners

• Health systems: hospitals & providers
• Universities
• Community partners: nonprofits & CBOs
• Government: local, state & federal

How We Pick Pilots

We select pilots based on five criteria:

1. Solve a critical problem in health, education, and work.
2. Can show results in 3–12 months, rather than long research projects or purely policy work.
3. Include public institutions as anchor partners, such as local governments, national nonprofits, and universities.
4. Leverage artificial intelligence to drive asymmetric results. Every pilot is anchored by AI and its transformative capabilities.
5. Are designed to scale.

The Model

Lion Institute is supported via Core Partners who make multi-year commitments. These funding commitments power the Institute and fund the pilots they choose to support.

Core Support

Supports Lion Institute’s team, technology, and infrastructure required to develop the pipeline of high-impact pilots.

Dedicated Pilot Funding

Core partners choose pilots they want to support with their resources and technology.

Partnership levels scale with the size of the annual commitment, with our largest Core Partners receiving a first look across the Lion Institute’s full pipeline of new pilots.

Who We Are

Christopher Kennedy McKelvy

Christopher Kennedy McKelvy co-founded K. Ventures and the Lion Forum in 2022. Before that, he served in the U.S. Army as an Airborne Ranger, completing a combat tour in Afghanistan focused on reconnaissance and surveillance. He was an early employee at Oculus VR and joined Meta following its $3.1 billion acquisition, where he led hardware and software partnerships with NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and other global technology companies. He serves as Vice Chairman of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, advancing opportunities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and holds an MPA from Harvard. Christopher was raised on the values of service and sacrifice. Lion Institute is his attempt to give back to the country that has given him so much.

Lion Institute is named after Senator Ted Kennedy, the Lion of the Senate and Christopher’s personal hero.

Judd Olanoff

Judd Olanoff co-founded K. Ventures and the Lion Forum in 2022. Before that, he spent his career in finance and politics. At J.P. Morgan's investment bank, he advised the companies that shape the American economy. In 2016, he led finance briefings for the Clinton campaign. He is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, where he argues that America's AI advantage depends not just on leading at the frontier, but on ensuring that families across the country experience its benefits in their daily lives. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and Barron's, and he holds an MBA from Stanford and an MPA from Harvard. The common thread in his career has been harnessing innovation and policy to strengthen the fabric of America.

The Lion Forum

The Lion Forum is an invitation-only convening held at the historic Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Each year it brings together the leading founders, investors, and elected officials working to revitalize the American Dream.

The Lion Institute is a major sponsor of the Lion Forum and uses it as a key platform to recruit partners and share its results with the world.

Why Now?

AI is moving faster than public institutions can absorb it. If trusted organizations do not help translate these tools into public benefit, the debate will be dominated by fear, backlash, and elite-only adoption.