“How Do You Unleash A Billion People To Solve The World’s Biggest Problems?”

At first glance it might appear that the Billionaire’s Institute is some kind of club for the elite echelon who have the kind of wealth most people can’t even imagine… not even close. Becky Kanis Margiotta and her friend Joe McCannon co-founded The Billions Institute to answer one question: “how do we unleash a billion people to solve the world’s biggest problems in the next 50 years?” Part of that question then became, how quickly can these ideas and actions be deployed if there were only 50 years in which to make them happen?

It might sound like a lofty goal but these two are no lightweights. Committed to advancing the science of large-scale change, Margiotta has a Masters Degree from The New School and was recognized by the White House as a Champion of Change in 2013 and by the Schwab Foundation as a Social Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015; McCannon was an appointee in the Obama Administration, serving as Senior Advisor to the Administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Using three core strategies to reinvent how social change happens, their aim is to train a force of change agents that are capable of transforming the planet through “developing new technologies for rapidly assessing the relative impact of major social problems, and the amount of resources committed to solving them; testing total transparency (i.e., cutting a window on every aspect of large-scale change work to invite active input from anyone, anywhere, who wants to contribute); and starting a “virtual country” – an online platform where citizens from around the world can pool resources and take joint action to address global commons issues (e.g., climate change, slavery and natural resource shortages).”