Today, Okta announced a donation of its Okta for AI Agents technology to World Central Kitchen, enabling the nonprofit to securely deploy AI to aid in its mission to provide fresh, culturally appropriate and nourishing meals to people in crisis. With Okta for AI Agents, World Central Kitchen is positioned to deploy AI agents that can predict food needs, speed up disaster response coordination, and equip local relief teams with real-time supply data — helping staff feed more families, faster, when hunger strikes.
Founded in 2010 by Chef José Andrés, World Central Kitchen has served more than 600 million nourishing meals in response to humanitarian, climate, and community crises. To protect its global operations, the organization has prioritized securing identity for more than a decade.
Photo credit to World Central Kitchen/WCK.org.
World Central Kitchen is leveraging the Okta platform — including Universal Directory, Single Sign-On, Multi-Factor Authentication, Lifecycle Management, and Workflows — as its centralized identity and access foundation to secure global operations and automate user lifecycles. Now, with Okta for AI Agents, the organization can extend that same rigor to agentic AI.
"As we scale globally and face more complex challenges, the identity decisions we make today will shape how ready we are for what's next—especially as AI agents become part of our toolkit," said Brian Stoll, CTO of World Central Kitchen. "This security foundation lets us move faster and innovate without putting our data or operations at risk. That's how we get aid to people faster."
The donation from Okta for Good, Okta’s social impact initiative, comes at a pivotal time. World Central Kitchen’s technology team is building a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which will enable frontline employees to build custom applications. But integrating AI agents introduces a critical challenge: visibility. You cannot secure what you cannot see. Without knowing which AI agents exist or what sensitive data they can access, IT teams face a difficult choice: restrict deployments or accept security risks.
Photo credit to World Central Kitchen/WCK.org.
Okta for AI Agents helps reduce this friction while enabling security. World Central Kitchen staff can safely deploy autonomous AI in high-stakes, resource-scarce environments. Non-technical users can quickly build tools to automate emergency food logistics, streamline onboarding, and coordinate crisis response in real time.
“We want to make secure AI adoption accessible to the nonprofit sector so they can safely protect the communities they serve,” Victor Cordon, Director of Social Impact at Okta, said. “This is a great example of how Okta for Good combines our technology, philanthropy, and expertise to help organizations adopt modern tools—like AI—without compromising on safety.”
World Central Kitchen joins the Blueprint Alliance
World Central Kitchen has also joined the Blueprint Alliance, a cross-industry coalition formed to help organizations operate their agentic stack as a unified, governed system. The blueprint provides organizations with an open, multi-vendor reference architecture that address four core challenges: Where are my agents? What can they do? What are they doing? How do I respond? As a strategic advisor, World Central Kitchen will help refine the blueprint on an ongoing basis.
Nearly four out of five login attempts at nonprofits are now fraudulent, making nonprofits the number one most-targeted industry, By securing and tracking AI agents just like human employees, Okta enables security teams to safely approve these tools—freeing organizations like World Central Kitchen to focus on delivering life-saving relief faster. That's the philosophy behind Okta for Good: Nonprofits deserve the same enterprise-grade security and expert guidance as Fortune 500 companies. Okta for Good is helping nonprofits close this gap.
