The Hero Awards announced a new guided workflow that enables everyday changemakers to convert each of the United Nations' 169 Sustainable Development Goal targets into credible, practical action plans using leading AI systems. According to CIO John Toomey, the protocol is designed for individuals who can dedicate approximately three hours to produce significant impact, with the first test participants being successful Substack writers. Since 2019, The Hero Awards has recognized individuals and teams advancing meaningful progress toward the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and with the rise of generative AI, the organization developed this methodology to make heroism practical, accessible, and predictable.
Education Director Amy Chang explained that the protocol produces multiple outputs including a GPT listed on OpenAI's GPT store, a continuously refreshed Innovation Engine built with Google's NotebookLM, and starting in 2026, a group collaboration tool based in Microsoft Loop. These components create 169 robust solution-evolvers that, alongside human judgment, keep generating new approaches to the Goals and Targets over time. Sustainability Director Savithri Patel noted there hasn't been an obvious route for everyday heroes to earn recognition for sustained work on planetary challenges, so they created a process that blends human judgment with AI to make ideas more grounded, practical, and less vulnerable to hallucinations.
The workflow begins by priming each AI system with heavily tested prompts to keep it narrowly focused on generating actionable, real-world solutions. Each model then extends and refines the prior model's work, adding specificity, clarity, and verification steps as proposals progress. The current highest-performing sequence includes Meta.ai, Claude, CodeCopilot.microsoft.com, Gemini.google.com v.3, Perplexity.ai, Deepseek.com, and ChatGPT (v.5.2). In practice, one SDG target is given to the first model, then that output is handed to the second model, and so on until all seven systems have strengthened and stress-tested the plan.
Completed solutions are archived on The Hero Awards' Academia.edu page so others can review, reuse, and improve them. Winners receive recognition across the organization's channels, and awardees gain the unique privilege of conferring the honor upon others who complete the protocol. The organization emphasizes that the workflow doesn't just improve final deliverables but also develops participants' analytical and creative abilities as they iterate across AI systems with different strengths and blind spots.
In a preliminary 2022 project that preceded this initiative, the organization found that for every 100 completed procedures, 29 participants produced content that gained traction in traditional media, 14 were quoted in academic or professional journals, 7 launched NGOs or non-profits connected to their chosen Target, and 5 founded startups. The largest source of new insightful project participants in 2025 was Substack creators. Chang described this as a way to democratize planetary stewardship and human flourishing through enjoyable work using familiar AI tools that helps people develop a global mindset making change feel both achievable and personally meaningful.
