Calling all social entrepreneurs + nonprofit leaders: Apply for The Audacious Project

Our first collection of Audacious Project winners takes the stage after a stellar session at TED2018, in which each winner made a big, big wish to move their organization’s vision to the next level with help from a new consortium of nonprofits. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED

Creating wide-scale change isn’t easy. It takes incredible passion around an issue, and smart ideas on how to move the needle and, hopefully, improve people’s lives. It requires bottomless energy, a dedicated team, an extraordinary amount of hope. And, of course, it demands real resources.

TED would like to help, on the last part at least. This is an open invitation to all social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders: apply to be a part of The Audacious Project in 2019. We’re looking for big, bold, unique ideas that are capable of affecting more than a million people or driving transformational change on a key issue. We’re looking for unexplored plans that have a real, credible path to execution. That can inspire people around the world to come together to act.

Applications for The Audacious Project are open now through June 10. And here’s the best part — this isn’t a long, detailed grant application that will take hours to complete. We’ve boiled it down to the essential questions that can be answered swiftly. So apply as soon as you can. If your idea feels like a good fit, we’ll be in touch with an extended application that you’ll have four weeks to complete.

The Audacious Project process is rigorous — if selected as a Finalist, you’ll participate in an ideation workshop to help clarify your approach and work with us and our partners on a detailed project proposal spanning three to five years. But the work will be worth it, as it can turbocharge your drive toward change.

More than $406 million has already been committed to the first ideas in The Audacious Project. And further support is coming in following the simultaneous launch of the project at both TED2018 and the annual Skoll World Forum last week. Watch the full session from TED, or highlight reel above that screened the next day at Skoll. And who knows? Perhaps you’ll be a part of the program in 2019.

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From left in the photo at the top of this post: The Bail Project‘s Robin Steinberg; Heidi M. Sosik of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Caroline Harper of Sightsavers; Vanessa Garrison and T. Morgan Dixon of GirlTrek; Fred Krupp from Environmental Defense Fund; Chloe Davis and Maleek Washington of Camille A. Brown and Dancers and pianist Scott Patterson, who gave an astonishing performance of “New Second Line”; Andrew Youn of the One Acre Fund; and Catherine Foster, Camille A. Brown, Timothy Edwards, Juel D. Lane from Camille A. Brown and Dancers. Obscured behind Catherine Foster is Raj Panjabi of Last Mile Health (and dancer Mayte Natalio is offstage).