2018 BridgeBuilder Challenge

1. Ideas

The Ideation Phase is about coming up with real solutions.

The Ideation phase is more than just a call for proposals. At OpenIDEO, we believe that new and existing ideas become better through collaboration, transparent feedback, and iteration. Participants are encouraged to build off of others' concepts, collaboratively share insights, and combine ideas to reach innovative new places.

What's Happening

Share your ideas to answer the Challenge question for a chance at a share of $1M, due by June 4, 2018 at 5pm PT.

Get Involved

Stay tuned for our webinar announcement calendar.

Key Dates

Starts on May 1, 2018. Ends on June 4, 2018.

Phase Closed

2. Review

During the Review Phase, GHR and OpenIDEO review all submissions based on our evaluation criteria.

For three weeks, the GHR and OpenIDEO Evaluation Team will review all published proposals. Proposals on the platform will lock during this review period, though we encourage you to leave and respond to comments, feedback or insights that may fuel idea development.

What's Happening

All submitted ideas will be reviewed.

Get Involved

Leave and respond to comments, feedback or insights on the platform.

Key Dates

Shortlisted proposals will be announced on June 21.

Phase Closed

3. Beneficiary Feedback

Our Beneficiary Feedback Phase is all about understanding end users.

During our Beneficiary Feedback phase, we ask shortlisted contributors to get feedback from their communities, consider their end users, and apply these learnings to their proposal. We encourage the entire BridgeBuilder community, not just our shortlisted proposals, to follow along with us through the Refinement process.

What's Happening

All shortlisted teams will gather feedback from their communities and end users.

Get Involved

Follow along and use resources, as shortlisted ideas explore and learn more about their communities of focus.

Key Dates

Starts on June 22, 2018. Ends on July 13, 2018.

Phase Closed

4. Expert Feedback

During the Expert Feedback Phase, idea teams receive feedback and advice from experts in the field.

During the Expert Feedback Phase, shortlisted ideas will have the opportunity to be matched with experts from various fields to gather feedback and additional insights, which will help inform the evoluation of their proposal.

What's Happening

All shortlisted teams are matched with relevant experts, to support the development of their proposals.

Get Involved

Continue to stay in step, interacting with and leaving feedback for our shortlisted teams.

Key Dates

Starts on July 14, 2018. Ends on July 27, 2018.

Phase Closed

5. Improve

The Improve Phase allows shortlisted teams to use feedback from previous phases to improve and finalize their idea.

During the Improve Phase, each shortlisted idea will have 2 weeks to apply feedback to their proposal.

We encourage shortlisted ideas to:

• Review feedback from experts and apply to your proposal

• Incorporate constructive feedback from community (on platform)

• Gather any additional beneficiary feedback and apply to your proposal

What's Happening

Shortlisted teams will have 3 weeks to apply feedback and learnings to their final proposals.

Get Involved

Support and learn from shortlisted teams as they finalize updates and learnings in their proposals on the platform.

Key Dates

Starts on July 28, 2018. Ends on August 15, 2018.

Phase Closed

6. Final Evaluation

During our Final Evaluation Phase, all shortlisted ideas will be reviewed.

During our final evaluation period, shortlisted ideas will be reviewed by GHR Foundation, expert evaluators, and OpenIDEO Challenge team. This will be a period of deeper diligence and evaluation,

What's Happening

All ideas will be reviewed by the Challenge team and GHR Foundation.

Get Involved

Stay tuned for Top Ideas annoucement.

Key Dates

Starts on August 16, 2018. Ends on September 30, 2018.

Phase Closed

7. Top Ideas

Top Ideas Announced!

After reviewing more than 675+ submissions over the course of six months, we selected five Top Ideas that we believe are addressing important and urgent global challenges intersecting peace, prosperity and planet in radically new ways.

Learn More About the Winners Here

What's Happening

Selected grantees are announced and awarded.

Key Date

Top Ideas were announced on October 1, 2018.

Explore Top Ideas

The Need to Build Bridges

Global challenges are complex and interwoven, and cannot be solved in isolation. Whether working to advance peace, ensure prosperity, or protect our planet, there is a need to design and build approaches that incorporate multiple perspectives, keeping pace with the speed at which the global community is moving and evolving. Therefore, building and maintaining connections between people and issue areas is essential. Throughout the innovation Challenge, we refer to this as ‘bridging’ work.

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The Need for Meaningful Engagement

A different kind of solution requires a new way of working, both within communities of focus and with each other. How might a design leverage and empower local assets, rather than perpetuate inequitable power dynamics? BridgeBuilders approach the complex and interwoven challenges at hand in a human-centered and community driven way, equipping end users to thrive and evolve sustainably.

BridgeBuilder Engagement Principles:

To guide your work, we have outlined these five Principles, which reflect BridgeBuilder’s vision for engagement and design approach. We hope you and your organizations will find opportunities to build these into your projects and Challenge participation:

Meet people where they are. Geographically, socially, culturally, and otherwise.
Build relationships. Foster trusting, authentic, and reciprocal relationships characterized by respect and compassion.
Listen deeply. Listen with humility and treat peoples’ stories with dignity and respect.
Work alongside. Work with partners and communities to assist and empower them in the process of infusing new life and vitality (either environmentally or socially) into their communities.
Be responsive. Address and incorporate new learning as relationships deepen, further knowledge is revealed, and community or contextual conditions change.

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The Need for Effective Design

We are looking for ideas that address the urgency of a problem while designing with the community to permanently change the situation. We are interested in solutions designed not for but with the communities of focus. Our BridgeBuilder Design Principles will guide our finalist selection process, and should serve as a North star as you build solutions.

BridgeBuilder Design Principles:

Address Urgent Needs. We are looking for ideas that address pressing, urgent global and local challenges faced by people and communities at the intersection of peace, prosperity and planet around the world. Winning ideas will clearly articulate the urgent need which their idea aims to address.
Root Ideas in Community. We are looking for ideas that utilize approaches built from the context, cultures, knowledge, wisdom, needs, and aspirations of the communities of focus.
Promote Pathways Towards More Equitable and Just Systems. We are looking for ideas that have the potential for lasting change by shifting power structures, altering narratives, and moving the world in a more equitable and just direction. In other words, ideas that sustainably empower communities, emphasize the positive, and lift people to reach their full potential.
Be Principles Driven. We are looking for ideas that use BridgeBuilder Engagement and Design principles to guide reflection, decision-making, and action in the face of complexity and uncertainty.

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Submission Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria

Submissions are welcome from registered nonprofit, civil society, community-based, and for-profit organizations working anywhere in the United States or around the world.

Our Submission Guidelines:

Bridge two or more topic areas: Ideas must address two or more of the topic areas (peace, prosperity, and planet).
Originality: Ideas should also strive to build and repair unique bridges between people, issues, and beliefs that promote meaningful engagement, greater social cohesion, and sustainable, community-led change.
Actionable and tangible: Ideas must be actionable and center on tangible results in the community of focus (rather than research, convenings, policy development, or advocacy).
Within funding scope: Ideas that can be implemented within a 36 month timeline and budget requests of less than US$500,000.

Find out more about our Evaluation Criteria and submission guidelines and requirements here.

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The Prize

Selected Top Ideas will:

Receive a share of $1 million in seed funding from GHR Foundation
Join a BridgeBuilder cohort of innovative organizations working to address urgent needs
Take part in a kick-off workshop, during which they will meet other social innovators and further design and build their approaches with tools and expertise from GHR Foundation and OpenIDEO
Receive ongoing partnership support from GHR Foundation, potential connection to other funder networks, and media exposure.

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Where Do You Fit In?

If your organization is already doing bridging work, we’d love to learn more about how this Challenge might advance your project. If your organization is only focusing in a singular community or on one topic area, join our Challenge to explore new models, expand the scope of your work, and connect with others doing work that may complement your mission.

Still have questions about this Challenge? Here are a few examples of top ideas from the 2017 Challenge that we hope will inspire you to participate or join the community:

A solution bridging Peace, Prosperity and Planet:

PeaceDirect: Supporting small scale gold mining cooperatives made up of war affected people to produce more environmentally friendly & ethical gold.

A solution bridging Planet and Prosperity:

BioCarbon Engineering: Saving lives and fighting climate change by rapidly regrowing the forests of vulnerable coastline communities in Myanmar with drones.

A solution bridging Prosperity and Peace:

Local Youth Corner Cameroon: Innovatively promote efforts to prevent/counter violent extremism through developing creative skills/capacity of youth violent offenders .

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The Challenge Process

During the Ideas Phase, we'll call on our global community to share ideas that bring people together to address urgent challenges at the intersections of peace, prosperity, and planet in radically new ways. The ideas do not need to be perfect or fully polished—in fact, we encourage early entry in the Ideas phase so that Community engagement will allow you to iterate and improve your idea.

With help from our Challenge sponsor, we’ll select a shortlist of submitted ideas that will move into the Beneficiary Feedback Phase. During Beneficiary Feedback, we’ll ask contributors to test ideas in their communities and apply feedback to their proposal. Shortlisted participants will be expected to participate fully in gathering user feedback at the community level.

During the Expert Feedback Phase, shortlisted ideas will have the opportunity to be matched with experts from various fields to gather feedback and additional insights. After expert feedback, we’ll open the Improve Phase, during which each idea will have three weeks to apply the expert feedback to their proposal, finalize it and resubmit it along with a project budget.

After these phases, we’ll review the shortlist with our Challenge sponsor, evaluate the ideas using our criteria, and announce the Top Ideas—a set of solutions representing promising innovations that best reflect the spirit of BridgeBuilder. Top Ideas will receive seed funding and post-Challenge support from GHR, as well as ongoing connection opportunities with other BridgeBuilders and OpenIDEO.

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About Our Sponsor

The Challenge sponsor, GHR Foundation, is anchored by a belief in responsibility, action, and the knowledge that we are all connected regardless of race, religion, nationality, or economic status. For 50-plus years, GHR has been pioneering design-build philanthropy as it collaborates with community experts to design and build opportunities and favorable environments for change to take hold. The Foundation sees faith as a powerful resource for good—a unifier and lever for social change, and a driver for bridging between people, networks, issues, and resources. Inspired by its founders’ Catholic faith, GHR aims to leverage the BridgeBuilder Challenge to answer the universal call of Pope Francis to “build bridges” and contribute to making the world a better place for all humankind.

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Translated Resources

To make this Challenge accessible to our global community, we've translated the Challenge Brief and the Challenge Evaluation Criteria into multiple languages. Please check out the list of translated resources below for a version in your language. Please note that, unfortunately, we are only able to evaluate proposals in English at this point in time. If submitting in English is not possible for you or your team, please plan to submit earlier, and send us a note at bridgebuilder@ideo.com. Although we cannot promise capacity to read and evaluate in other languages, we will try to do our best to provide the necessary support.

Translated Challenge Briefs

Translated Evaluation Criteria

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Channel 1

Public Challenge

Channel 2

Private Challenge

2018 BridgeBuilder Challenge

How might we come together to address urgent global challenges at the intersections of peace, prosperity, and planet in radically new ways?

In partnership with

Learn more about the vision, purpose and goals of our second BridgeBuilder Challenge:

What Happened?

the winners:

What's Happening Now

Background

Challenge Journey

Current Phase

The Ideation Phase is about coming up with real solutions.

What's Happening

Get Involved

Key Dates

During the Review Phase, GHR and OpenIDEO review all submissions based on our evaluation criteria.

What's Happening

Get Involved

Key Dates

Our Beneficiary Feedback Phase is all about understanding end users.

What's Happening

Get Involved

Key Dates

During the Expert Feedback Phase, idea teams receive feedback and advice from experts in the field.

What's Happening

Get Involved

Key Dates

The Improve Phase allows shortlisted teams to use feedback from previous phases to improve and finalize their idea.

What's Happening

Get Involved

Key Dates

During our Final Evaluation Phase, all shortlisted ideas will be reviewed.

What's Happening

Get Involved

Key Dates

Top Ideas Announced!

What's Happening

Key Date

The Challenge

How might we come together to address urgent global challenges at the intersections of peace, prosperity, and planet in radically new ways?

The Need to Build Bridges

The Need for Meaningful Engagement

The Need for Effective Design

Submission Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria

The Prize

Where Do You Fit In?

The Challenge Process

About Our Sponsor

Translated Resources

Challenge Resources:

Challenge Team:

Join our Mailing List

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