Giving Compass' Take:

• Chris Anderson explains how The Audacious Project is bringing players together to create impact at scale to efficiently improve the world. 

• What kind of partners do you need to achieve your desired impact? Can you join existing collaborative efforts that align with your philanthropic goals? 

• Learn more about collective impact. 

Large-scale change depends to a huge degree on people with a special mindset: entrepreneurs. They have the ability to imagine a better future and the courage, ingenuity, persuasiveness and determination to make that future real. Entrepreneurs can choose one of two main paths: for-profit (business entrepreneurs) or nonprofit (social entrepreneurs). In today’s world, those two paths will take them on radically different journeys.

A group of us would like to contribute another concept to the list. We’re calling it “The Audacious Project: Collaborative Philanthropy for Bold Ideas.” It’s the result of four years of dreaming and experimentation with an extraordinary group of collaborators.

The core idea of The Audacious Project is to do three things simultaneously in order to spark change at scale. You can think of it as an attempt to imagine what an IPO for the nonprofit world might look like, or simply as a thrilling way for private individuals to pool resources and work together in the service of entrepreneurs who could change the world. Here are the three key steps:

1) Invite some of the world’s greatest change agents to dream like they’ve never dreamed before and create ideas that are truly audacious. These ideas might impact millions or even hundreds of millions of people, impact our environment at a planetary scale, or transform science and our long-term prospects of survival and flourishing.

2) Vet the ideas to find those which genuinely offer a path to execution, scale and impact. Select the best and help shape them into actionable, multi-year plans that are both viable and sustainable.

3) Present them to the world in a single moment that provides as much visibility and excitement as possible, and invite people to support them … together. Use the momentum generated by the occasion to build a community of committed supporters for each project who will sustain it over multiple years, contributing ideas, time, influence and, of course, money, and be true partners in their success.

Read the full article about The Audacious Project by Chris Anderson at TED.