TED Doesn't Just Want to Spread Ideas Anymore — Now It Picks Projects and Sends Them Hundreds of Millions | Live From TED2018

Ideas Worth Investing?

On the afternoon of April 11, Vancouver time, TED curator Chris Anderson announced onstage that the Audacious Project, four years in the making, was officially launching: TED will help nonprofit organizations (NGOs) around the world raise hundreds of millions of dollars to drive social change.

“This is the most ambitious thing TED has ever done,” Anderson told QDaily in an interview.

TED's slogan is Ideas Worth Spreading. The Audacious Project is where those ideas are supposed to land.

Anderson argues that social entrepreneurs running nonprofit projects need funding just as much as the founders of commercial companies do. But commercial founders can reach venture capital and other investors, and they can even raise money from the public through an IPO. Social entrepreneurs have to ask donors one at a time, and what they raise is far less than commercial venture money. Many spend half their energy fundraising just to keep their NGOs running, so the impact they manage is far smaller than it should be.

Matching charitable projects with donors has always been hard. The Audacious Project is meant to solve that.

Anderson calls it, half-jokingly, an APO — an Audacious Project Offering, the IPO of charitable organizations.

The fundraising target is $634 million, and $406 million has already come in. The money will be paid out in installments over five years to five projects. Worth noting: every project chosen runs at least three to five years. None of them are short-term bets.

Five NGOs rather than one, because different charitable foundations care about different things, so five have a better chance of attracting money from a range of funds. The sources include foundations TED has long worked with, such as the Gates Foundation and the Bezos Family Foundation. Anderson stressed that TED is not building an Audacious fund of its own. It is building a bridge between donors and NGOs. The money never passes through TED.

Crowdfunding platforms also help social entrepreneurs raise money, but TED's method is nothing like crowdfunding, and every step of it carries TED's mark. Projects on crowdfunding platforms go unscreened, and the public's money scatters in every direction. TED screens NGOs the way it screens speakers, controlling for quality. The result is that a large sum lands on just these five projects. “Scale” was the word Anderson kept returning to; he believes only scale can really push change through.

As with crowdfunding, though, neither individuals nor foundations get to tell a project what to do.

The website went live today. Every April, anyone can submit an idea online. TED will pull more than 20 projects out of the global pool of applicants, put them in front of the public for evaluation, then narrow the list and hand it to investors, who will already know roughly how a project is coming along by April of the following year.

That April, the NGOs will share their progress with everyone at the TED conference, hoping to raise more. So there it is: NGO founders have to raise money through TED's way of telling a story. It's the TED Talk class they have to take if they want funding here.

The Audacious Project is no real surprise. Anderson probably realized long ago that many of the people who come to TED each year are sitting on a project of their own and hoping to run into the right investor. TED has an explicit rule against actively pitching or soliciting investment, so nobody bothers the audience. But partnerships, funding and acquisitions happen at TED conferences all the time.

This time TED stepped in itself, to do the matchmaking at a higher level.

A venture capital firm can judge its investments by returns on capital. How do you measure a charitable project?

Anderson said in the interview that this has always been the problem with charitable work. No single standard fits every project, since each one does something different. But to get into the Audacious Project, a project has to be capable of deeply affecting millions of people, or of affecting the planet and the global environment — global warming, for instance.

So the assessment follows the reach of the impact. Success or failure isn't judged at the last step; there are checkpoints all along the way. Even a $100 donor, he said encouragingly, will get timely updates and reports on results.

This year TED has picked five NGOs that passed its review. Its due diligence concluded that these five have a strong chance of winning donors over.

Just as you'd expect from TED, the five founders each gave a TED-style talk: the round red carpet, no more than 18 minutes, one big question raised, and, however dire the problem, the feeling at the end that it can be beaten.

The five were scheduled to speak at 5 p.m. on the 11th. The talks had started at 8:30 that morning and had already worn some of the audience out, but when these five finished, almost the entire hall stood and applauded.

First up was Raj Panjabi, a doctor, founder of Living Goods & Last Mile Health and an earlier winner of the $1 million TED Prize. Six million children die every year around the world, he said, for lack of proper treatment. “Disease is global, but treatment isn't.” His answer includes training local health workers in care skills, teaching them to use mobile phones to diagnose and record children's health, and supplying modern medicine.

Panjabi wants to build a global medical academy, something like an online university, where people can be trained on the platform and learn from one another. “Our goal is to send 50,000 health workers with smart devices into six countries in West and East Africa, serving 34 million people,” Panjabi said.

Robin Steinberg, founder of the second NGO, The Bail Project, has been called “a perfect TV drama heroine” by the star screenwriter Shonda Rhimes.

Steinberg and her husband are both public defenders. Their job is to get back the freedom of people who should never have been locked up. The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate. “Every night, half a million Americans who have done nothing wrong are forced to spend the night in jail, and the culprit is simply that they can't pay bail,” Steinberg said.

In American local jails, 75 percent of the people held there are held because they can't pay bail. To Steinberg, a single day behind bars — even a few hours — is a lasting “stain” on a life: these people can lose their jobs, lose their homes, damage their immigration status, even lose custody of their children.

“Americans put up $1.4 billion in tax money every day to keep these people sitting in jail, and we are no safer for it,” Steinberg said.

Freedom, in her view, “should be free.”

Over the past 10 years Steinberg built a fund that pays bail for New Yorkers; when the legal process ends, the money comes back, and it goes on to free the next person. By her arithmetic, every dollar donated today can free 15 people over the next five years.

Her next step is The Bail Project: raise more money, train more public defenders like herself in 40 places across the country, pay bail for 160,000 Americans and give them their freedom back.

Heidi M. Sosik, a marine biologist and founder of WHOI, studies the ocean's twilight zone, a layer of the sea humans know almost nothing about. When people think of the ocean, Sosik says, they think of large creatures, but the twilight zone holds countless tiny organisms. By day they feed in the shallows; at night they return to the deep, carrying carbon dioxide back down with them. “They're the largest migration on Earth, and for hundreds or thousands of years they've been helping us reduce global warming,” Sosik said.

But overfishing is now turning the twilight zone into a gold field, mined without pause. Along with calling for less fishing, Sosik is investing in a new technology that can help people find more of the unknown creatures down there and work out their numbers and feeding habits. Knowing all that, she argues, will open up more possibilities for humanity.

Trachoma is one of the oldest human diseases, an infection caused by Chlamydia trachomatis that brings eye pain, damage to the surface of the cornea, or blindness. It feels as if your own eyelashes were growing inward into your eye.

Caroline Harper, a doctor and founder of Sightsavers, gave the numbers at TED: two million people worldwide are blind from trachoma, and 200 million are at risk of losing their sight.

Harper devised a treatment with four steps: operate on patients, provide antibiotics, teach people to wash their faces, and separate animal quarters from human ones so fewer flies spread the bacteria. Harper hopes to help 12 African countries be rid of trachoma entirely, and to supply $2 billion worth of medicine. Sightsavers has raised $50 million so far.

Talk about global warming and carbon dioxide comes up far more often than methane. But to the environmentalist Fred Krupp, methane does far more harm than carbon dioxide, and the naked eye can barely see it. The real numbers on methane pollution are also much higher than what governments tell us.

The oil and gas industry is the main emitter, and the United States accounts for 10 percent of the world's methane emissions. Krupp plans to send up a satellite that can detect and collect data on methane pollution anywhere. “Cutting methane emissions from the global oil and gas industry is the fastest thing we can do right now to control global warming,” Krupp said. “MethaneSAT9 [the satellite] can draw us that map, let us quantify the problem, find the places where methane can be cut, and update our progress in real time.”

“We want to cut methane emissions by 45 percent before 2020, and the cost of sending up the satellite is genuinely small,” Krupp said.

Unemployment, unsafe streets, long-term poverty and cultural factors have left 82 percent of Black women overweight and 59 percent obese, and large numbers of Black women with chronic illness. Many of them die younger than their peers.

Vanessa Garrison and T. Morgan Dixon built GirlTrek, the largest Black women's health organization in the United States. Their answer isn't complicated: walk every day.

GirlTrek wants to train 10,000 people it calls “health leaders” to lead the 50 areas in the country with the worst obesity problems. Each one, they figure, can mobilize 100 people, so 10,000 health leaders can mobilize a million Black women. “We want to make walking a ‘tradition of transformation’ in the Black community, and it's also the most effective way we have right now to solve our health crisis.”

GirlTrek has already gathered 100,000 Black women across the country to put on its T-shirts and walk together. This coming summer it will roll out more training programs, including a 54-mile walk. GirlTrek's ultimate goal is to get 10,000 Black women across the country walking every week.

“Seventy percent of the people in the world living at the poverty line are farmers, and these farmers are the hardest-working people I have ever seen,” said Andrew Youn, founder of One Acre Fund.

Give those farmers advanced agricultural supplies and training, Youn argues, and they will harvest more food and earn a steadier income.

One Acre Fund now works with 600,000 smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, providing the best seed and fertilizer and checking on their planting at any time. After harvest the farmers pay One Acre Fund a fee. “They're like our customers,” Youn said. It is a way of operating that can sustain itself.

Farmers who have taken One Acre Fund's help have seen their incomes rise 50 percent, and the Audacious Project's money has already tripled the organization's size. Youn hopes to reach 1.25 million farming families before 2020.

Cover image: TED