Since 2019, The Hero Awards has honored individuals and groups who initiate exceptional progress toward the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Today, the organization announced a new track designed for everyday changemakers: a guided, seven-step workflow that channels the complementary strengths of leading AI systems to turn each of the UN’s 169 targets into credible, actionable plans, said CIO John Toomey. “We’ve built a protocol that takes the average person about two hours. The end product includes a GPT listed on OpenAI’s GPT store, and a constantly updated Solution Engine created by Google’s NotebookLM. The result will be 169 powerful entities which, in conjunction with human intelligence, continually derive fresh approaches for the Goals.”
“There hasn’t been a clear route for everyday ‘heroes’ to be recognized for sustained work on planetary challenges,” said Amy Chang, Sustainability Director at The Hero Awards. “We built a process that blends the best of human judgment with AI—refining ideas iteratively across models to produce practical, grounded strategies for each target while sharply cutting down on hallucinations. The way we see it, such a tactic allows participants to “Be the Singularity”—to epitomize the magic moment when AI surpasses human intelligence.”
How the protocol works
The process begins with ‘priming’ each AI so that it is laser-focused on creating actionable solutions. Each model’s output feeds the next, so the solution gains depth and rigor at every stage. The current highest-performing sequence is:
- Meta.ai
- Claude.ai
- Copilot.microsoft.com
- Gemini.google.com
- Perplexity.ai
- Deepseek.com
- ChatGPT (v.5)
Turned into a cross-model prompt chain, a single target is presented to Model 1; its response is passed to Model 2, and so on, until all seven have strengthened and stress-tested the proposal.
Early results and collaborators
Initial trials involved students from Cambridge, Yale, Berkeley, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, working alongside learners from the Herat Underground School in Afghanistan, which educates girls barred from formal schooling by the Taliban.
Recognition, archives, and scale
Completed solutions are archived on The Hero Awards’ Academia.edu page for ongoing study and reuse. Winners are celebrated across the organization’s social channels, blogs, websites, and via press announcements. Awardees also earn the unique privilege to confer the honor on others who follow the protocol.
Measurable impact on skills—and outcomes
Beyond strong deliverables, the process itself upgrades problem-solving capacity. “Each AI has a distinct ‘personality’ with different strengths and weaknesses,” said Savithri Machiraju, Education Director for The Hero Awards. “As participants iterate with all seven models, they not only coax better answers from the AIs—they amplify their own analytical and imaginative skills exponentially.”
A forerunner project showed compelling growth outcomes: out of every 100 full run-throughs, 61 participants wrote a widely read blog post on sites like Substack, Medium, or Ghost, 39 published an article, 8 launched an NGO or nonprofit aligned to their target, and 5 built a startup. Similar results are anticipated with the new initiative.
“We view this as a way to democratize planetary stewardship and human flourishing,” added Chang. “It’s work—but it’s enjoyable work with familiar AI tools—and it can build a global mindset that proves change is both achievable and personally rewarding.”
Learn more: theheroaward.net/home
Nominations & inquiries: admin@heroaward.net
UN Global Indicator Framework: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/indicators/indicators-list/
Source: SubmitMyPR
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