How Catalytic Funding Fuels Lasting Change

How do you create real, lasting change? It’s one of the biggest questions in philanthropy, and  one that we are constantly turning over. Change in the short-term can seem relatively clear: raise money and deploy a solution with a great team. The greater challenge is understanding how the solution works as planned, and where it doesn’t–teaching you something important, and how this all unfolds over time, long after the initial funding ends. 

At The Audacious Project, we’ve spent eight years diligently learning and building that second part. We don’t just look for big ideas; we look for ideas that can be put into meaningful action for paradigm-shifting, sustainable change.  We’ve learned–among much else–that big challenges need big bets and unrestricted, multi-year funding, and that kind of resourcing takes a courageous community of peer funders. 

To date, Audacious has supported 70 projects, catalyzing more than $7.6 billion in funding–an extraordinary milestone that points to the distinct power of collaborative philanthropy, when bold ideas and possibility are matched with a committed community that acts with purpose.

Each year the Audacious community selects and nurtures a group of big, bold projects designed to move the needle on the world’s most urgent challenges. These projects have transformed educational systems worldwide and helped millions lift themselves out of ultra-poverty. They are driving medical breakthroughs – developing the world's first computer-generated protein medicine, revolutionizing COVID-19 surveillance and response systems and repurposing medicines to cure rare diseases. From developing the first whale language model to transforming how we track methane emissions, year after year, these projects redefine what is achievable in our world. 

In India, a country home to one of the largest populations of girls who’ve been excluded from an education, Educate Girls set out to enroll more girls in school, focusing on the specific villages where the problem is most acute and launching a holistic set of interventions to address the issue from all angles, embedding their methodology into government programs across states, and building a network of thousands of volunteers to champion girls education. By looking at the full system, in just six years, they’ve scaled from enrolling 213,000 out-of-school girls to enrolling more than 1.58 million and keeping them in school with a staggering 90% retention rate, among the best results globally for large‑scale programs.  

And, when you give brilliant social entrepreneurs the runway to fly, they innovate in ways a grant agreement could never predict.  In 2020, the Institute for Protein Design received unrestricted long-term funding through Audacious just as the COVID-19 pandemic was exploding. They were able to pivot their work instantly beyond their initial plans toward vaccine work, and created the first-ever protein-designed vaccine – approved for use in the UK and South Korea. Now, that same flexibility has allowed them to unlock a universal flu vaccine candidate now in trials. 

There are many more examples. Think of Us has transformed child welfare and foster care policy in the United States, influencing all 50 states to adopt new “kinship” care standards – placing children with family members or family friends rather than in the traditional foster care system – unlocking $3 billion in federal funding. Last Mile Health is revolutionizing the landscape of healthcare in Africa. They partnered with governments and invested in scalable community health systems so that half of Africa’s 54 countries have committed to adopt policies recognizing community health workers as essential, paid members of their health systems and workforce. 

While progress is astounding, more is possible. Last Mile Health was just selected for our reinvestment pilot program, providing a secondary funding round to previous grantees that demonstrated significant results after their initial five years of funding. The Audacious community committed nearly $50 million in total follow-on funding to three selected organizations to scale their work and sustain their impact. This pilot demonstrates a commitment to flexible, long-term funding and to the value of providing a longer runway for organizations creating transformational change. 

As we look ahead to the 2025 Audacious cohort, we are yet again blown away by their visions for the future. These projects have received $1.03B in funding from the Audacious community — and are poised to create massive change. They are doing everything from leveraging AI to discover new medical treatments to charting paths to plastic-free oceans, cleaning waterways and decarbonizing the shipping sector, expanding life-saving reproductive health care for women and girls globally, preventing homelessness in the US, investing in low-income and first-generation college students and eliminating childhood lead poisoning around the globe. The breadth and depth of these interventions are awe-inspiring. 

What these leaders imagine is possible. And we feel so lucky, together, to see a better future with them. 

To our grantees: thank you for your courage, creativity and relentless commitment to change. And to our community, thank you for learning with and betting on these incredible leaders. 

In humble gratitude, 

Anna Verghese
Executive Director, The Audacious Project

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