The main purpose of this document is to give a quick overview of Impact Academy to inform future discussions between us. However, we also appreciate your written input, and you are more than welcome to add comments to this doc. Additionally, we are looking for team members and collaborators, so please forward this to others who you think might be interested or indicate if you would be interested in working with us by reaching out to [email protected] or subscribing to our newsletter via our website.
Impact Academy is a non-profit organization that enables people to become world-class leaders, thinkers, and doers who are shaping their careers and character to solve our most pressing problems and create the best possible future.
Impact Academy was founded in February 2023 by Vilhelm Skoglund, Sebastian Schmidt, and Lowe Lundin after running Future Academy - a six-month ambitious educational program. Future Academy was supported by Open Philanthropy, among others, and we have gotten $3+ million for setting up the organization and carrying out its next projects in 2023.
Our mission is to:
Enabling global talent to become leaders, thinkers, and doers who use their careers to mitigate global catastrophic risks and contribute to a better future.
To deliver the best interventions possible and inform others, we will use an experimental approach, conduct applied research and share our findings. Additionally, we will provide small grants to our participants and others who share our aims. Over time we will likely increase our grantmaking efforts, focusing on incubating and supporting longtermist projects and organizations.
Impact Academy’s first intervention was Future Academy (FA). Future Academy aimed to equip university students and early-career professionals from anywhere in the world with the thinking, skills, and resources they need to pursue ambitious and impactful careers. It was a free six-month program consisting of four in-person weekends with workshops, presentations, socials, and monthly digital events. Furthermore, the 21 fellows worked on an impact project with an experienced mentor and received professional coaching to empower them to increase their impact and become their best selves. Upon completion of the program, all participants went to a global impact conference (EAGx Nordics) where four fellows presented their projects. We awarded stipends of a total of $20,000 to the best projects. The projects included a sentiment analysis of public perception of AI risk, a philosophy AI alignment paper, and an organization idea for improving research talent in Tanzania. Our faculty included entrepreneurs and professors from Oxford University and UC Berkeley. We consider FA to have been a success and we are now running a second and more developed version of the program, including different tracks for fellows interested in different priority paths.
This project is a fellowship for people who are in the early to mid stages of their policy careers or graduating from top schools and want to understand the field of AI governance quickly. This will be achieved by running an online fellowship. The fellowship will be centered around mentorship and project work.