Jeremy Heimans is co-founder and CEO of Purpose, a home for building 21st century movements and crowd-based social and economic models to tackle the world’s biggest problems. Since its launch in 2009, Purpose has launched several major new organizations including All Out, a 2.2 million-strong LGBT rights group, built the world's first open-source global activism platform, and advised institutions like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the ACLU, and Google.
Previous experience
Education: Jeremy has been building movements since the age of 8 when, as a child activist in Australia, he ran media campaigns and lobbied leaders on issues like children's rights and nuclear non-proliferation.
Jeremy began his career with the strategy consultants McKinsey & Company and he has degrees from Harvard University and the University of Sydney. He lives in New York.
Politics: In 2004, Jeremy dropped out of Oxford to co-found a campaign group in the U.S. presidential elections that used crowd-funding to help a group of women whose loved ones were in Iraq hire a private jet to follow Vice-President Dick Cheney on his campaign stops, in what became known as the "Chasing Cheney" tour.
The following year he co-founded GetUp, an Australian political organization and internationally recognized social movement phenomenon that today has more members than all of Australia's political parties combined. In 2007, Jeremy was a co-founder of Avaaz, the world’s largest online citizens’ movement, now with more than 41 million members.
Awards: In 2011, Jeremy received the Ford Foundation's 75th Anniversary Visionary Award for his work as a movement pioneer and the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. He has also more recently been appointed the Chair of the Global Agenda Council on Civic Participation through the World Economic Forum. In 2012, Fast Company ranked him on their annual list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business. The World e-Government Forum has named him as one of the top ten people who is changing the world of politics and the internet, and The Guardian named him one of the ten most influential voices on sustainability in the US. And in 2015, Jeremy received the Inspired Leadership Award, a distinction issued annually by The Performance Theatre to an emerging leader with an existing track record and demonstrated potential to positively impact lives on a global scale. His work has been profiled in publications like The Economist and The New York Times, and his most recent thinking with Henry Timms on "new power" was featured as the Big Idea in Harvard Business Review, as one of 2014’s top TED talks with more than a million views, and by CNN as one of ten top ideas to change the world in 2015.
Speaker: Jeremy has been a keynote speaker at venues such as the World Economic Forum at Davos, TED, the RSA, Chatham House, the United Nations, Blair House, The Economist Big Rethink, The Guardian Activate, Social Media Week and the Business Innovation Factory.
