At Purpose, Jeremy Heimans strategizes how to harness new social, economic and technological models to build movements with impact.

Why you should listen

Jeremy Heimans has been building movements since childhood, when he ran precocious fax campaigns on issues such as environmental conservation and third world debt in his native Australia. A former McKinsey strategy consultant, he has co-founded several online campaign groups and citizen activism initiatives, including GetUp (an Australian political movement with more members than Australia's political parties combined), Avaaz (an online political movement with more than 40 million members) and AllOut (a global movement for LGBT people and their straight friends and family). 

Now based in New York, Heimans is co-founder and CEO of Purpose, a social business that builds movements and ventures that he says, “uses the power of participation to bring change in the world.” He and colleague Henry Timms, executive director of 92nd Street Y, a cultural and community center in New York, and founder of #GivingTuesday, are set to publish an essay in November 2014 examining new forms of power and their meaning. As Heimans puts it, “Old power downloads and commands; new power uploads and shares.”

The World Economic Forum at Davos named Heimans a Young Global Leader and in 2011 he was awarded the Ford Foundation's 75th Anniversary Visionary Award. In 2012, Fast Company named him one of the Most Creative People in Business, and in 2014, CNN picked his concept of "new power" as one of 10 ideas to change the world

Jeremy Heimans’ TED talk

More news and ideas from Jeremy Heimans

We humans

How to build a successful movement in 4 steps

April 27, 2018

There’s a kind of Hunger Games occurring among organizations and brands to seize people’s attention and loyalty. Here’s what it takes to win power in today’s hyperconnected age, according to activists Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms.

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News

7 fascinating things I learned at the TEDSalon Berlin

June 24, 2014

Yesterday, nearly every seat of the theatre at the Admiralspalast was filled for the TEDBerlin Salon, the first official TED event in Germany (and, with TEDGlobal’s move to Rio in October, the only one taking place in Europe this year). In two sessions hosted by Bruno Giussani, 15 speakers and performers covered an eclectic array of topics, whizzing from tech-driven social […]

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