Have you ever wondered what, or who, shapes your future? What we’ve noticed over the past decade of selecting TED Fellows is that the people who are actually shaping the future are the people doing the work, often at the local level. They’re the ones working on the ground to better their communities — and scaling that impact as they dream bigger. 

Your future is shaped by the engineer turning her community’s passion for dirt bike culture — a heavily policed pastime — into an opportunity for STEM career development. 

Your future is shaped by the urogynecologist providing accessible medical advice for mothers, from pregnancy through infancy, directly to their mobile phones. 

Your future is shaped by the theater artist who illuminates how coming undone, in all its pain, can be the first step toward transformation — if you allow it to be.

Your future is shaped by the geothermal entrepreneur creating a new energy future, one house at a time, by consumerizing geothermal technology.

The TED Fellows program recognizes people like this: the folks working on the ground on world-changing ideas. To support their work, the program offers them TED’s power to articulate and amplify their visions. A world-changing idea is central to the selection of a Fellow, but our support goes deeper on the personal level. The TED Fellows program supports the individual capacity-building required to take the global stage. We equip TED Fellows with public speaking and media training, professional coaching, educational programming and peer support. We connect TED Fellows to a global network of peers and industry leaders — because the only way to succeed is together. 

The TED Fellows program works to celebrate local ideas, and elevate real leaders to places of authority and influence. We work to shift power and get important new ideas about science, art, justice, medicine, technology and design into the cultural mainstream. We work to help the vast and global TED audience take action to create a more informed, creative and just society. Most of all, we work to improve conditions for the planet and for communities around the world, creating positive change within our economic, judicial and creative systems. 

Want to join us? Apply to be a TED Fellow.

Our application is open to anyone with an internet connection until June 30, 2021, and we invite you to learn more about applying to become a TED Fellow by visiting go.ted.com/tedfellowsapply.