10 years of The Audacious Project

The Audacious Project
The Audacious Project
Virgin Galactic
Richard Branson's signature
Published on 9 October 2025

Time flies when you’re having fun and doing good. There is no better example than The Audacious Project, which started 10 years ago on a wet and windy Hobie Cat.

Sailing from Necker Island to Moskito Island with Chris Anderson, Jean Oelwang, Sam and Holly, we began with a question: what could happen if we invited non-profit leaders to dream up their biggest dreams together, and then gift considerable sums to tackle them? We decided to slow the boat, circle Necker multiple times, and brainstorm ideas. By the time we pulled ashore, we had come up with the concept for Audacious and agreed to hold the first gathering in the British Virgin Islands.

The Audacious Project logo
Image from The Audacious Project

Chris volunteered to have his team at TED handle the day-to-day running of Audacious. A decade later, thanks to Chris, Anna Verghese and the Audacious team, over $6.6B of funding has been mobilised to non-profits in support of some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Our wonderful teams at Virgin Unite have played their part, and we all met up to celebrate the founding collaborators of The Audacious Project in New York recently. Chris and I shared stories about the project and the many, many initiatives it has supported, including One Acre Fund – one of the first recipients of Audacious funding.

With their Audacious Project grant, One Acre Fund set a bold target to reach 1.25 million African farming families through direct services and another 3 million through partnerships. Today, One Acre Fund serves 2.1 million farm families directly and another 3.4 million through partnerships, financing and training to harvest more food and grow their way out of poverty, while also planting over 250 million trees across 40 diverse species.

One Acre Fund farmers
The Audacious Project

Another game-changing project the group supported was the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), mapping land that’s home to over a billion people, transforming disaster response, public health, and climate resilience. The nearly 60 organisations that Audacious supports are out there making a real difference – and I’m constantly inspired by the scale and impact of their work.

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team

Those early gatherings on Necker and Moskito Island are some of my fondest memories and it is incredible to see what Audacious has become today. I’ve always believed we have more impact when we work together, and that has been a guiding spirit of The Audacious Project.

It was great to see Clive Calder, who ran Jive Records back when I ran Virgin Records. We used to compete for artists but always remained friends. How delightful we’ve been able to work together on Audacious, alongside his wonderful wife Patricia, his brilliant daughter Robyn and so many others.

One of my big takeaways of UNGA this year was the need to find the positives and turn them into even more positives. As we look ahead to the next decade, projects like Audacious, the visionary non-profit leaders taking on their biggest dreams, and all the wonderful, generous people who support them, leave me more optimistic than ever.