TED's Audacious Project raised $1B from donors in 2 days to fund big nonprofit initiatives

NEW YORK — Last October, 35 major donor families, calling their collaborative The Audacious Project, gathered in California and committed $1.03 billion to more than a dozen nonprofits whose proposed projects span multiple years and take on major challenges.

The collaborative, housed at TED, announced the winning nonprofits Tuesday, after spending more than a year selecting the groups and helping them sharpen pitches for larger projects than philanthropic funders typically support. It's not until the donors meet in person that they decide how much to give to each group.

Jennifer Loving, the CEO of the San Jose-based nonprofit Destination: Home, said it was ''shock and awe,'' when they learned the donors had met their funding request to help expand homeless prevention services to multiple U.S. cities.

''It's not for the faint of heart to work on this issue in America,'' Loving said, referencing the stigma around poverty. ''And so you kind of brace yourself. You never know if people are going to see what you see and it was beautiful. It was really beautiful.''

Connie Ballmer, cofounder of Ballmer Group along with her husband Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, has been a donor since 2021, when she went with one of their sons to learn more about funding around climate change.

''Nowhere that I know of can you raise a billion dollars in two days,'' she said. ''For an organization to raise an amount — whether it's $40, $60, $80 million, I mean, do you know how long that takes them to do that kind of fundraising?''

This year, the grantees also include the Arc Institute, a relatively new research group in California, to support its development of a virtual model of a cell that it hopes will help scientists identify treatments for complex diseases like Alzheimer's.

In total, 55 major donor families have participated in at least one round of The Audacious Project's work. The group expands by invitation and the formal criteria that donors be willing to commit at least $10 million to the funding round. Many end up donating more, in part inspired by the commitments that others make in the room.

Another donor, Tegan Acton, who cofounded Wildcard Giving along with her husband, Brian Acton, a cofounder of WhatsApp, said she participates because she believes in collective action and values the focus on funding solutions developed by people close to the problems. Acton also said she's enjoyed seeing how different donors approach their funding decisions.

''Some people come and they have a binder printed and they have a thousand tabs with little notes about every project and they've marked up the appendices'' she said, whereas others, ''show up and watch the videos and see what sparks interest.''

As part of the application process, finalists record something like a TED Talk that introduces themselves and their project.

Loving, from Destination: Home, said the guidance from Audacious and The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting firm, helped sharpen their plan for scaling their approach to homelessness prevention. The initiative, Right at Home, identifies people and families most at risk of losing their housing and gives them money and support so they don't. The approach now has won significant public funding in San Jose.

Loving's project is a good example of the kind of big change that The Audacious Project seeks to identify. Her group had not aspired to work nationally but identified a solution they think may help other places. Rather than opening new offices or expanding, they will partner with local groups, bring them funding and ask them to participate in research to assess the impact.

For the first time this year, some organizations received a second commitment from Audacious donors, including Last Mile Health. Their initial grant in 2018 helped to train many more community health workers in multiple African countries, going from 2,000 to 23,000. This time, they received $20 million to again train more of these front line health workers but also to support an ongoing project to coordinate and mobilize more domestic funding from the countries where they work.

''It's not just a philanthropic investment and then a cliff,'' said Lisha McCormick, CEO of Last Mile Health. Instead, the funds will support a reworking of how governments fund their public health systems following major cuts to U.S. foreign aid, which made up a significant portion of some countries' health budgets.

Anna Verghese, executive director of The Audacious Project, said they'd considered making second round grants for a while.

''The honest question that we and our donor community had to wrestle with is, what kinds of partners are we if we walk away right when that momentum is building?'' she said.

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