All of that is the good news. You WILL earn the award, if you accept it; you WILL be able to use it to publicize your channels like Substack, and other things you do; you WILL be able to confer the Award upon others indefinitely as a way to help them grow. And it's free.
There is a bit of bad news: There is a 2-3 hour AI prompting process that must be followed to ensure that the structure we build around the particular UN Target you choose will produce new discoveries consistently and permanently.
You can perform the process yourself, have a friend, relative, or associate do it, or (in some cases) ask us to do it. (We are sometimes willing to do so because..... we love this stuff! We learn amazing things every time we follow the protocol, and we could do it all day long).
Before we explain the protocol, some background: The Hero award has been conferred since 2018. Recipients have been honored for doing things like creating an efficient backpack water purification device for remote Indonesian villages, developing a Mobile banking system for smallhold farmers in Colombia, establishing a digital online school for underserved populations in Bangla Desh, and building health care facilities in rural Malaysia and Cambodia.
Since 2019, we have celebrated individuals or institutions who have made significant strides towards addressing the UN’s 17 Agenda for Sustainability Goals, and specifically the 169 Targets the UN has identified within the Goals proper. The Hero Award was founded by Amy Chang, Soani Gunawan, John Toomey, Savithri Patel and students from Cambridge, Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Oxford, Texas A&M, Duke, and Harvard, as well as the Herat Underground School for Girls in Afghanistan (their participation comes with significant risk, as you can imagine).
In 2025 our focus has turned heavily towards AI solutions. Here's where you come in.
While we still confer the prize on those who invent, develop, or refine solutions to the Targets in 'traditional' ways, we now reward those who have demonstably 'moved the needle' in combining human intelligence and artificial intelligence in novel ways to address the issues represented by the 17 Goals.
In 2024 we decided we want to make earning the Award a simple task; by just following a recipe that maximizes the full spectrum of both artificial and human intelligence, we can almost guarantee new insights and approaches towards the 17 Sustainability Goals. So everyone who follows and completes the recipe earns the Award.
The new protocol sequences 7 popular AI bots in turn to uncover and create original innovative thinking for the 169 targets. [Scroll to the bottom to read complete Target list].
Turned into a viable prompt, every Target is given to each AI in turn, and the answer fed into the next one, until it has been refined by all seven.
When all 169 Targets are completed, we will have a living set of 169 powerful, ever-learning, ever-evolving solution machines that will find new approaches to the UN 17 Sustainability goals 24 hours a day.
This process takes advantage of the strong points each LLM model has, while drastically reducing hallucination. The result is a comprehensive, trustworthy, solidly grounded plan of action for achieving the given Target.
The prompting sequence which has so far proven to elicit the most original, profound, and actionable solutions is this:
Meta.ai
Claude.ai
Copilot.microsoft.com
Gemini.google.com
Perplexity.ai
Deepseek.com
Chatgpt.com (v.5.2, from December 2025)
To participate, someone chooses one of the Targets and turns it into a prompt, adding this:
"From now on, act as an expert assistant with access to all your reasoning and knowledge. Always provide:
A clear, direct answer to the request.
A step-by-step explanation of how you got there.
Alternative perspectives or solutions that are not typical of mainstream thinking on this Target.
A practical summary or action plan that can be applied immediately.
Never give vague answers. If the question is broad, break it into parts. If you are asked for clarification, act like a professional in that domain (teacher, coach, engineer, doctor, etc.). Push your reasoning to 100% of your capacity."
[This prompt, chosen from a sample group of hundreds, has shown itself to be best at getting the most useful answers from all 7 of the AIs]
After the prompt has been submitted to all 7 AIs in sequence, the process is:
Submit the final result to the Hero Award Research Hub academia.edu site. (login: admin@aibrainstormcreator.net, PW LongitudinalHeroAwardStudy).
Post it to the Hero Award Linkedin group, https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14292380/
Send the result, plus notes, to admin@aibrainstormcreator.net, so that we can add it to Press Releases
Mention it in your Substack posts and notes, linking back to TheHeroAward.net
Create a GPT for it by going to https://chatgpt.com/gpts/editor. If you don't have a ChatGPT Plus or Pro membership, ask us to do it by writing to admin@heroaward.net.
Send it to admin@aibrainstormcreator.net so we can add it to this website.
All six steps are necessary to make your Hero Award submission viable. Completing them insures that your work reaches bloggers, influencers, and traditional and social media (through press releases), scholars (via academia.edu), professionals (Linkedin), Web searchers (this site), ChatGPT users (through the GPT) and your followers (Substack, and whatever other platforms you use).
If you follow the formula carefully, you win a Hero Award, with all the honors and privileges appertaining thereto.
Participants can address more than one UN Target, and multiple people can utilize the same Target, as the AIs (and their human partners) are always accessing new content.
In initial experiments it has been discovered that as valuable as the multiple-AI derived results can be, far more important has been the advancement in cognitive skills experienced by participants who work with the 7 AIs this way. Each AI has a different 'personality'; each has varied strengths and weaknesses. As users work the system, they improve the ability of each AI to respond, but they also improve their own skills exponentially.
In a preliminary project which was a forerunner to this one, conducted in 2022, it was discovered that for every 100 completed procedures, 29 participants wrote a piece of content which received traction in a traditional media source, 19 were quoted in an academic or professional journal, 7 started an NGO or non-profit entity associated with the chosen Target, and 5 founded a startup. This was before the occurrence of Generative AI, of course, so results are not comparable, but we expect the results for this iteration to be similar.
Coming in early 2026: We will be creating a Google NotebookLM notebook for each Hero Award protocol, so that each can be a matrix for group mind mapping, which amplifies and refines the results. We will apply Perplexity Deep Research to the answers. We will develop a collaborative community within Microsoft Loop. We will create prediction engines for some solutions within Metaculus.com.
And whenever the AI companies introduce new models of LLMs, we will apply them to our work.
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2024 Hero Awards
1. The Deepa Vijayaraghavan Award, for Female Entrepreneurship in South Asia https://startup.siliconindia.com/vendor/shevolve-india-s-first-womenonly-mentoring-platform-that-is-transforming-leadership-for-women-cid-18081.html
2. The Shevchenko Award, for developing SaaS for reconstruction startups in Ukraine
3. The Byatshandaa Jargal Award, for empowering family farms in Mongolia https://www.unescap.org/sites/default/d8files/Life_Journeys_of_Transformative_Leaders_1.pdf
4. The Christina Yang Prize for using the MIT climate simulator to predict commodity shortages in ocean-derived precious metals https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=23.8.0
5. The Fatima Issa Prize, for promoting the use of Generative AI and forecasting tools like Metaculus to reform government ministries in Niger Metaculus.com
2023 Hero Awards
Kylee Hamamoto
WeGo! Hawaii helps young women discover and pursue their passions through leadership workshops and spaces for community-building and empowerment.
Jack Reichert
Go Green Filter is an invention that can convert the CO2 emissions from cars into oxygen via a filter containing algae, water, and light. Using the power of photosynthesis, the filter aims to be easy-to-use for consumers and would cut carbon emissions generated by automobiles by an estimated 74.25 percent.
Atreya Manaswi
Save Our Bees! has invented an organic treatment for small hive beetles, a pest that plagues honeybee hives.
Coonradt Jensen
Seeds of Hope is building and stocking seed libraries in spaces like schools and libraries, placing the power of re-establishing plant species native to Illinois back in the hands of community members.
2022 Hero Awards
Eden Wilson
Lemonerdy University is a peer-to-peer education platform that employs youth as instructors in STEM subjects.
Allison Huang
CapyChat is an AI-powered communication tool that helps children with autism express themselves. With this tool, children can chat with their favorite animals in multiple languages or create drawings that AI will transform into text.
Kasim Khapra
MyPy Coding’s team of over 100 tutors offers free, virtual, one-on-one coding lessons to second through eighth graders. They recruit older students as tutors, fostering connection and engagement among participants.
Subhadra Vadlamannati
EduLang is an app focused on translating children’s books into languages and dialects that are featured less frequently. The app uses machine translation APIs to translate children’s books into 108 languages, including Swahili, Ukrainian, and Somali.
2021 Hero Awards
Royford Mutegi, Diana Wairimu
Vermi-farm Initiative promotes sustainable farming, vermicomposting, and integrated waste management for farmers in Kenya.
Paul Coker
FarmSmarter supports locally based sustainable agriculture in Nigeria, Benin, and Ghana
Budi Setiawan, Ade Afrilian, Sendi Kenya
Fight for Dignity Supports empowering smallholders in Indonesia to benefit from Tourism industry
Ana Rosa
Meli network empowers indigenous and local communities to connect with experts to help shape
their regenerative practices.
2020 Hero Awards
Ecogenia
Mobilizes teams of young people to implement climate projects in underserved communities across Greece.
Dunia Bora
Helping East Africans engage in cactus farming as a way to build environmentally responsible enterprises.
Padam Jain
Conserving See, Enriching Lives is an NGO that supports 100,000 women farmers in India through projects such as preserving seed from healthy plant stocks that are in danger of dying out.
Concular
Revolutionizing the construction industry, which is involved in 40% of global carbon emissions, by introducing sustainable recycling practices.
Biopac
We innovate and manufacture seaweed-based bioplastics to reduce single-use plastic waste pollution and GHG emissions and to uplift the livelihood of seaweed farmers.