The Hero Awards has unveiled a new protocol that enables everyday individuals to develop comprehensive action plans for each of the United Nations' 169 Sustainable Development Goal targets using a guided, seven-step AI workflow. According to CIO John Toomey, the system is designed to be completed in approximately three hours and harnesses the complementary strengths of leading artificial intelligence systems to convert ambitious global targets into credible, practical implementation strategies.
Since 2019, The Hero Awards has recognized individuals and teams advancing meaningful progress toward the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals. With the rise of modern generative AI, the organization developed this methodology to make meaningful contributions to planetary challenges more practical, accessible, and predictable. Education Director Amy Chang explained that the outputs include 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 and mind mapping tool based in Microsoft Loop.
"There hasn't been an obvious route for everyday 'heroes' to earn recognition for sustained work on planetary challenges," said Savithri Patel, Sustainability Director at The Hero Awards. The organization created a process that blends human judgment with AI, moving ideas across multiple models to make them more grounded, practical, and less vulnerable to hallucinations. Patel described this approach as helping participants "Be the Singularity"—to epitomize the moment when AI begins to outperform human intelligence.
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 are featured across the organization's communication channels, and awardees receive the unique privilege of conferring the honor upon others who complete the protocol. The organization maintains additional resources at theheroaward.substack.com and theheroaward.net.
The Hero Awards reports that the workflow doesn't just improve final deliverables but also develops participants' skills. "Each AI has its own 'personality,' with different strengths and blind spots," Patel said. By iterating across all seven models, participants accelerate their own analytical and creative abilities while producing better results. In a preliminary project conducted in 2022, 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, who were among the first to test the complete system. Chang added that this approach democratizes planetary stewardship and human flourishing, describing it as enjoyable work using familiar AI tools that helps people develop a global mindset making change feel both achievable and personally meaningful. The initiative connects to the broader UN framework available at https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/indicators/indicators-list/.
