The Audacious Project
Funding initiative established by TED
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Details
The TED Prize was a prize commissioned by the American media organization TED Conferences. It ran from 2005 to 2017, culminating in a prize amount of $1 million.[2] In 2018, The TED Prize was recast as The Audacious Project.
TED described the change as:
a new model to launch big, inspiring ideas with the potential to affect millions of lives. Housed at TED, the Audacious Project brings together a powerful coalition of nonprofit organizations and individual donors with members of the public, allowing them to pool resources and work together in service of change-making ideas. An ambitious scale-up of the TED Prize's mission, The Audacious Project will increase impact by many orders of magnitude.[2]
The Audacious Project is supported by The Bridgespan Group, but lists many more organizations as its partners, including Virgin Unite and the Gates Foundation. According to TED, the project has helped participants raise $280m USD in funding.[3]
Winners
Unlike the original TED Prize, The Audacious Project awards a number of different winners each year. The nomenclature has also changed from 'winners' to 'Big Ideas'.
| Year | Big Ideas | Organization |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | What if we hit the brakes on climate change by tracking gas emissions from space? | Environmental Defense Fund |
| What if a million Black women launched a health revolution? | GirlTrek | |
| What if we digitally empowered community health workers to make care available to all? | Living Goods + Last Mile Health | |
| What if we supported millions of African farmers in growing more food — for themselves and the world? | One Acre Fund | |
| What if we eliminated a disease that has blinded people for thousands of years? | Sightsavers | |
| What if we ended the injustice of automatic jail time for those who can’t afford bail? | The Bail Project | |
| What if we explored the ocean’s vast twilight zone, teeming with undiscovered life? | Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution | |
| 2019 | What if science could eliminate racial bias in policing? | Center for Policing Equity |
| What if we could empower more than one million girls to enter the classroom? | Educate Girls | |
| What if we could harness the power of proteins to create the next generation of medicines and materials? | Institute for Design Protein | |
| What if plants can help slow climate change? | Salk Institute for Biological Studies | |
| What if we could massively reduce disease from parasitic worms in Africa? | The End Fund | |
| What if island nations’ debt could be restructured to protect vast areas of ocean? | The Nature Conservancy | |
| What if we could eliminate child sexual abuse from the internet? | Thorn | |
| What if every child came to school on day one ready to learn? | Upstart Project | |
| 2020 | What if we could harness AI to tackle the looming antibiotic resistance crisis? | The Collins Lab and MIT Jameel Clinic[5] |
| Decoding the communication of whales with advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics | Project CETI | |
| A global surveillance network to stop the next pandemic before it starts | ACEGID + Broad Institute | |
| Lifting the world’s poorest people out of ultra-poverty | BRAC | |
| Delivering mental health support to anyone, anywhere via text message | Crisis Text Line | |
| Supporting humanitarian response by mapping areas home to one billion people | Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team | |
| Supporting millions of African farmers to lift themselves and their communities out of poverty | One Acre Fund | |
| Leveraging medicine donation to make life-saving prescriptions more affordable for all Americans | SIRUM | |
| 2021 | Strengthening local election administration in the US | Center for Tech and Civic Life |
| Harnessing people centered technology to transform the US social safety net | Code for America | |
| Ending polluting road transport in time to avoid a climate crisis | Drive Electric Campaign | |
| Building critical mental health support and access in Central America's Northern Triangle | Glasswing International | |
| Unlocking legal rights so that refugees can resettle safely | International Refugee Assistance Project | |
| Giving smallholder farmers the power to invest in themselves | Myagro | |
| Training family caregiver to help their loved ones heal | Noora Health | |
| Securing land for Indigenous Peoples - for justice and our climate | Tenure Facility | |
| Integrating permafrost into our global solution for climate change | Woodwell Climate Research Center | |
| 2022 | Accelerating scientific discovery and the development of COVID-19 vaccines and treatments | Fast Grants |
| Remotely delivering cash support to the world's most poor during the pandemic | GiveDirectly | |
| Scaling emergency relief to Black communities hardest hit by COVID-19 | Harlem Children's Zone | |
| Rapidly increasing the scale, speed, and effectiveness of contact tracing in the US | Partners In Health | |
| A virtual mentoring platform to better equip health workers around the world in the fight against COVID-19 | Project Echo | |
| Helping US cities provide immediate food relief during the pandemic while supporting local restaurants | World Central Kitchen | |
| 2023 | Helping girls in Sub-Saharan Africa thrive in school - and beyond | Camfed |
| Scaling next-generation solutions to save ancient forests | Canopy | |
| Clearing arrest and conviction records to unlock opportunity | Clean Slate Initiative | |
| Safeguarding the ocean by making human activity at sea visible | Global Fishing Watch | |
| Engineering microbiomes with CRISPR to improve our climate and health | Innovative Genomics Institute | |
| Unlocking life-enhancing benefits for domestic migrant workers | Jan Sahas | |
| Accelerating renewable energy for a climate-secure future | Renew2030 | |
| Accelerating locally-led land restoration of Africa's vital landscapes and forests | Restore Local | |
| Transforming foster care in the US through the power of lived experience | Think of Us | |
| Increasing equitable access to high-quality contraceptive care | Upstream USA | |
| 2024 | Protecting humanity by monitoring AI for dangerous capabilities | METR and RAND |
| Finding truth and justice for the missing through forensic technology | Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense | |
| Leveraging AI to repurpose generic drugs and save patients' lives | Every Cure | |
| Creating a blueprint to fight classroom hunger across Africa | Food4Education | |
| Pulling the emergency brake on global warming through methane mitigation | Global Methane Hub | |
| Building a lifeline for the world's coral reefs | Great Barrier Reef Foundation | |
| Investing in refugee communities through entrepreneurship | Inkomoko | |
| Protecting the world's tropical forests and promoting sustainable land use with free, detailed maps | MapBiomas | |
| Transforming US public safety through resident-powered crime prevention | The Community Based Public Safety Collective and the Alliance for Safety and Justice | |
| Engaging communities across the US to redesign their schools | Transcend | |
| 2025 | The world's first high-utility virtual cell, an AI-model accelerating medical breakthroughs | Arc Institute |
| An initiative to close the college-to-career gap for low-income and first-generation college students in the United States | Braven | |
| A rugged learning solution that empowers children across Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve their full potential | Imagine Worldwide | |
| An initiative to prevent unsafe abortion by removing systemic, legal, and social barriers to care | Ipas | |
| An ambitious plan to reduce plastic production and foster a reuse-based circular economy | Plastic Solutions Fund | |
| A plan to combat lead poisoning at global scale and protect 500 million children | Pure Earth | |
| A proven prevention model redefining how the United States confronts homelessness by acting before in happens | Destination: Home | |
| An initiative to transform maritime trade from stern to bow, breaking dependency on fossil fuels | Solutions for Our Climate | |
| Intercepting 1/3 of river plastic before it reaches oceans | The Ocean Cleanup | |
| Stigma-free care empowering adolescent girls in Sub-Saharan Africa against unintended pregnancy, HIV, and sexual violence | Tiko |