8% of all Harvard juniors applied to our first fellowship, and three alumni just launched UpSide, an AI tool giving public-interest advocates the same firepower as corporate lobbyists.
Today I want to introduce you to a few people I’m just ENORMOUSLY proud of:
https://youtu.be/rUYIBuk1iEQ
This is the first cohort of our Moral Ambition University Fellowship at Harvard. Twelve of the most talented young people I have ever met, all of them determined to devote their careers to the biggest challenges of our time.
I’ll admit I enjoy this video a little extra, because I know how much blood, sweat and tears went into it! So let me give you the full context.
There is a war for the brightest students in America. And for decades, one side has vastly outspent the other. Every year, the consulting firms, the banks, the law firms and the venture capitalists pour fortunes into recruiting top graduates. As one early Facebook employee famously put it: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
From an excellent 2023 op-ed in the Harvard Crimson. Title: ‘How Harvard Careerism Killed the Classroom’.
A year ago, we decided to show up too.
I had just moved to New York to build the US branch of The School for Moral Ambition, an organization that helps the most talented people work on the world’s biggest problems (from ending factory farming to preventing the next pandemic). Things were going well in Europe, and our board had given me their trust to go on this adventure.
But for months, it simply didn’t work. I barely knew anyone. I had little experience as an entrepreneur. And what were we even building? A local community? One-on-one coaching? Mid-career fellowships, like in Europe? Much later, I learned that our board chair had quietly started wondering whether it was time to pull the plug on the whole US experiment and call me home.
Then, on a long transatlantic flight, I rewatched The Social Network — the film about the rise of Facebook, a company that began in a Harvard dorm room. And it hit me: the whole disaster of talent flowing into BS jobs started at places like Harvard.
Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.
So maybe the countermovement should start there too.
One problem: I had never set foot on Harvard’s campus. I didn’t know a single person there. But I figured that if we could build a movement of ambitious idealists at this extraordinary concentration of privilege, capital and talent, we could build it anywhere. That’s how the Moral Ambition Fellowship at Harvard was born.
One year later:
People sometimes ask: why elite universities? Why not start somewhere else? Our answer is simple: because that’s where the other side spends the most, so that’s where we have to compete hardest.
And to those who say these Harvard kids are just privileged and not all that impressive: I understand the skepticism! But having worked with them, I’ve been genuinely struck by how insanely talented they are, which is exactly why the other side spends so much trying to reach them.
(It’s also worth knowing that 83% of our first cohort receives need-based financial aid and/or is the first generation in their family to attend college.)
So let me state our ambition publicly: over the next five to ten years, we want to bring this fellowship to every elite university in the United States. We’re just getting started.
Search ‘Harvard University’ on Trip Advisor and our posters come up 😂
Meanwhile, we’re also building out our mid-career fellowships, for people a little further along. We just closed a recruitment round that drew no fewer than 2,587 (!) applications from around the world (compared to 751 last year). Right now we’re working on the fight against the tobacco industry, the fight for tax fairness, and the transition to a food system that’s more sustainable (and better for both people and animals). Next up: making sure AI doesn't go catastrophically wrong, and keeping our democracies from falling apart.
https://youtu.be/ChWR1WXwreg
What the 38 alumni from our first two cohorts have already built is, again, something I’m really, really proud of. Between them, they have founded three new organizations, The Protein Project, SHIFT and Impact Unfiltered, which exposed tobacco-industry manipulation of an EU consultation (as covered by Politico).
This week, the fourth one launched, UpSide.org, founded by three kick-ass alumni: Stephanie Kersten-Johnston, Peter Halliwell and Laura Picot. Each of them walked away from an established career to build something the advocacy world badly needs.
Peter Halliwell, Stephanie Kersten-Johnston and Laura Picot: co-founders of UpSide.
To explain what they’re building, let me give you some context again. Here are two pretty shocking numbers:
The result: the people defending the common good are simply outgunned. A corporate lobbyist can afford a team of analysts tracking every amendment. A campaigner for clean air or healthy food usually can’t.
Until now. Laura, Peter and Stephanie are building shared AI infrastructure that gives under-resourced advocates the same intelligence firepower the big players (like Big Tobacco) take for granted. In one of their first pilots, they scored how 37 countries regulate novel nicotine products (more than 2,000 data points) and presented the results inside the European Parliament. One advocate called it worth WEEKS of manual work.
We’re never going to be richer than the big corporations. But we can be smarter!
UpSide’s amendment tracker of the EU Safe Hearts Plan. A policy officer at a major public health organization said: “Normally I’d spend days searching through these amendments; now it’s all analyzed and presented in a much easier-to-understand format.”
There’s so much more I’d love to share with you, about the college chapters getting started at Princeton, Brown, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Georgetown and elsewhere, about our new online community platform, and much more, but this newsletter is already getting too long. And I need to finish a new chapter for the US edition of my Reith Lectures, which will be published early next year (my deadline: next week! 😅).
For now, consider joining our movement at moralambition.org and feel free to share this newsletter with all the ambitious idealists in your network 🚀
Until the next one! Rutger
