A group of donors and philanthropy experts led by TED, the organizer of the popular conferences and talks, have joined forces on a new effort called the Audacious Project, which will distribute more than $250 million among five grantees with ideas “that will take your breath away,” according to Chris Anderson, TED’s curator.
The goal, Anderson says, is to support “thrillingly bold” ideas that are capable of improving the lives of millions of people. The effort has drawn on contributions and expertise from a number of philanthropies and nonprofit experts including the Bridgespan Group; the Dalio, Gates, MacArthur, and Skoll foundations; philanthropists Laura and John Arnold; ELMA Philanthropies; Intuit founder Scott Cook and his wife, Signe Ostby; and Virgin Unite.
Anderson hopes that elevating five projects in the public eye and providing hundreds of millions of dollars in support will spur “thousands” of individual donors and foundations to join in and offer even more in contributions to the winners.
Audacious will name the first five grant recipients on April 11 at a TED conference. The project will replace the TED Prize, which began in 2005 as a $100,000 prize, and was later increased to $1 million.
Big-Bet Philanthropy
Audacious is the latest philanthropic “big bet” in which donors identify promising solutions to seemingly intractable problems and pour money into them. In November, Bill and Melinda Gates, Jeff Skoll, and other billionaire participants in the Giving Pledge, a commitment of superwealthy donors to give the majority of their money away during their lifetimes, dedicated $500 million to Co-Impact. The donor collaboration will make large grants each year to a small number of nonprofits working to change social systems that trap people across the globe in poverty and contribute to poor health.
The following month, the MacArthur Foundation made its own nine-figure commitment when it announced it would provide $100 million to help Syrian children through grants to the International Rescue Committee and the Sesame Workshop.
Other big-bet efforts have included donor collaboratives like Blue Meridian Partners, a $1 billion grant-making effort led by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and megagifts from individuals, including Mark Zuckerberg’s 2010 contribution of $100 million to the Newark public school system.
By offering such a large award, Anderson hopes Audacious will increase the chances of success and free up social entrepreneurs to concentrate on their work.
“So much of their time is spent on the heartbreaking, grinding work of fundraising, where you do it one meeting at a time. The money never comes in without strings attached, and it is usually short-term,” he said. “This is giving them permission, and encouraging them, to dream bigger.”
Anderson declined to identify the winners of this year’s awards. He said at least two grantees are domestic and that members of the slate of winners work to address a range of issues including climate change, criminal justice, and disease prevention. One of the projects is focused on scientific research, he said.
Unlike a pooled fund, in which donors arrive at a consensus on which groups to back, Audacious participants decided individually on projects they would support and how much they would give once TED, Bridgespan, and others vetted potential grantees. For that reason, the $250 million will not be split evenly among the five winners.
Critics Weigh In
The rise in what some have called moonshot philanthropy reflects the success many Silicon Valley venture investors and business leaders have had picking winners among a crowded field of technology entrepreneurs, said Mark Kramer, founder of consulting firm FSG. Kramer said he admires the ability of these donors to write big checks and incur great risks. Too often, he said, donors fragment their giving among many causes.
However, Kramer, who spoke without knowledge of the Audacious plan, prefers another approach, generally known as “collective impact.” In such a framework, the main responsibility of a donor isn’t writing a big check but bringing together many regional nonprofit, business, and government groups to concentrate their efforts on an agreed-upon plan of action. Without gathering all of these actors around a common purpose, he argues, an infinite amount of money can be showered on a problem without achieving success.
Plus, as heroic as they may seem, even the biggest philanthropic efforts may be insufficient to tackle the toughest societal problems, Kramer said.
“What seems like a big bet to a donor, and is a big bet to typical philanthropy, is still a rounding error in most cases when you look at all the flows of funding that affect a particular issue,” he said. “However wealthy and generous a person may be, the scale of philanthropy is infinitely smaller than the scale of most social issues people try to tackle.”
Martin Morse Wooster, senior fellow at Capital Research Center, is also skeptical of large-scale philanthropy.
Wooster, like Kramer, didn’t have prior knowledge of the creation of Audacious.
He said large donations to scientific research make sense. After the money is spent, on development of a vaccine, for instance, there is a clear indication of success or failure. But when donors spend billions on trying to solve social ills, Wooster suggested, hubris often clouds their judgment and results are hard to discern.
“There are real strict limits to the ability of foundations to change society,” said Wooster, who wrote a book called Great Philanthropic Mistakes. “Many ideas won’t work. A big bet in philanthropy is like a big bet in a casino. You can put all your money on red, but if it comes up black, what are you going to do?”
Joining Forces
Anderson wants the naysayers to give big-bet philanthropy a second look. The ideas Audacious will support, he said, are surfaced directly from people working to improve the world, rather than being designed by wealthy philanthropists and imposed on nonprofit leaders. By joining forces, foundations and individuals can now support projects in a way that will encourage large-scale change, he predicted.
“We haven’t given big bets a chance because we haven’t funded these things collaboratively,” he said. “Why give up before you’ve started?”
Anderson credits Richard Rockefeller with the inspiration for Audacious. Rockefeller, who died in a plane crash in 2014, was the son of the late philanthropist David Rockefeller.
The two men and Anna Verghese, a TED Prize veteran who will lead Audacious, were aboard the National Geographic boat Endeavour, bound for the Galápagos Islands. They were making the voyage to promote Mission Blue, a TED prize winner aimed at protecting the oceans.
During a discussion on board the ship, “Richard stood up and said, ‘The problem in philanthropy so often is not that we ask for too much, it’s that we ask for too little,’ " Anderson recalled.
Rethinking Risk
Audacious is a response to Rockefeller’s maxim, addressing what Chris Addy calls philanthropy’s “aspiration gap.”
Addy, the co-leader of Bridgespan’s philanthropy consulting practice, said that the majority of large donors want their gifts to make headway on hard-to-solve social and environmental issues. But when it comes to actually giving, rich donors tend to favor institutions like colleges and medical centers that don’t come with as much risk as making a gift to a social entrepreneur.
Because the Audacious winners have been studied by Bridgespan, TED, and the other Audacious participants, potential donors might be more apt to give, knowing that the risk of failure is spread among so many national philanthropies. The project also will help donors who are interested in being part of a big effort to change society but don’t necessarily know where to start looking.
“We’re explicitly trying to create more shovel-ready opportunities,” he said.
Unlocking Tech Money
Courtney Martin, a journalist and consultant to TED, said Audacious might be the key to unlocking the philanthropy among legions of tech entrepreneurs who have flocked to TED talks across the country.
“These people are deeply inspired and have incredible wealth, but they’re not actively funding because it sounds too hard, too bureaucratic, and too time-consuming,” she said. “Part of the effort is to expedite the process, make philanthropy more thrilling, and to attract people to philanthropy.”
Martin has written skeptically about moonshot philanthropy, suggesting that the approach views the inability to solve social problems as a failure of imagination, the absence of will, or the lack of a technical fix rather than a recognition that social problems are often very complex.
She declined to divulge the identities of any of the winners, but she said her concerns about big-bet philanthropy had been assuaged by the fact that several of the projects have strategies that explicitly attempt to empower people in the affected areas.
The project differs from other big bets, she said, in that it doesn’t embrace a philanthropist-as-savior mind-set — the donors all recognize the possibility of failure.
Anderson agrees. After the five inaugural winners are announced next week, he hopes thousands of donors will make contributions. The group will then announce an open call on its website for next year’s funding round. Anderson hopes this year’s participants re-up their commitments and that other donors will join in pushing donation levels past $250 million.
“There’s absolutely zero guarantee the same kind of funding will come in again,” he said. “On the other hand, there’s a possibility there’s enough excitement sparked here that we actually build on that.”
The Winners
On April 11, the Audacious Project announced the five winners of its grants, but it did not disclose how much they would receive. The recipients:
The Bail Project is working on ways to create a self-sustaining national bail fund to help those who can’t afford to get out of jail.
The Environmental Defense Fund is launching a satellite to track methane emissions from space so companies and governments have information they need to take action to prevent climate change.
GirlTrek will train a million black women to encourage more people to participate in physical activities to improve health in the 50 highest-need communities in America.
Sightsavers will seek to eliminate trachoma in less than a generation.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will deploy technology to uncover the secrets of a mysterious layer of the ocean that’s an integral part of the marine food web and earth’s climate system.
The following two efforts, which were part of a pilot of the idea for the new awards, will also receive more money to expand their work.
Living Goods and Last Mile Health are using mobile technology to improve access to health care in needy parts of the world.
One Acre Fund is expanding its work to improve productivity of small farms in rural sub-Saharan Africa.
