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The Audacious Project is a collaborative funding initiative between TED and non-profits that convenes funders and social entrepreneurs in order to scale solutions to the world's most urgent challenges. [1] In 2018, The TED Prize was recast as The Audacious Project.
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]
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 |
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