Introduction
We are living in a time of disruption. Across government, business, academia, and civil society, forces of change are upending assumptions about how societal problem-solving advances. Amid the upheaval, leaders often want to test, shape, and share big ideas that seize an opportunity to guide change in a shifting status quo.
In 2024, the 17 Rooms flagship decided to adapt its approach to problem-solving for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Specifically, we decided to re-orient our platform away from advancing next step SDG actions over 12- to 18-month horizons toward “big ideas” that could make a big difference in driving better SDG outcomes by 2030. We want to support potential actions that are audacious enough to inspire but practical enough to meaningfully improve hundreds of millions of lives—or a commensurate share of the planet—by 2030.
To test the new approach, we invited ideas from a wide array of constituencies, knowing it might only lead to a handful of Room-style working groups in the first year that meet a bar for big ideas. We refined our convening techniques to support leaders in identifying and shaping their ideas. In parallel, we sought to elevate Room insights through published op-eds, which now serve as an opportunity to complement the typically longer-form Room memos that can still be published on the Brookings and The Rockefeller Foundation webpages.
In a similar spirit of renewal, we took a fresh approach to convening 17 Rooms community members on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in September in New York. The annual gathering at The Rockefeller Foundation’s New York headquarters brought community members together around themes of inspiration, collegiality, and opportunity (see Box 1). The informal connections and “DIY” problem-solving energy fostered many new connections and seeds for future potential big ideas.
By the end of 2024, the upshot was an impressive series of Rooms committed to ideas that combine evidence-based feasibility with innovative risk-taking. Proposals ranged from time-bound cash transfers as a medical prescription to fight infant poverty to deploying artificial intelligence to infer the priorities of non-human species and allocate funding accordingly. A short summary of each Room’s idea is presented below.
Importantly, through conversations with diverse leaders over the past year, we were struck by how many people report feeling stuck in a big problem—bogged down in details and debates—without the tools or head space to formulate breakthrough solutions. It was much more common to hear someone say something like, “we need a place to think about this problem together,” rather than “I have a new idea that I need help thinking through.”
These conversations helped motivate a July op-ed by John and Zia on “Rebooting the Sustainable Development Goals.” As we wrote there:
Big ideas rarely emerge on their own. Our respective professional experiences and collaborative efforts have taught us that innovative SDG solutions must be encouraged, cultivated, and supported … for the best ideas to emerge, the world needs tools, processes, and systems that can bring together diverse views, and yet the lack of available tools for developing multi-stakeholder solutions is startling.
To this end, in 2024, we refined our approach to helping Rooms launch and land their work. We now pursue a rapid sequence of curated virtual meetings using tailored convening techniques that can be flexibly applied to ideas at any stage of development—whether early scoping, initial demonstration, or full-blown scale-up. Along the way, we remain mindful of the need to blend formal convening structure with people-centric informality to unlock the collaborative capabilities of the Room.
Room summaries
The following is a summary of the seven Rooms that brought together the key ingredients for advancing and elevating big ideas in 2024.
Room 1 proposed a national strategy to deploy perinatal cash transfers as a prescription intervention toward eliminating deep infant poverty in the U.S. by 2030. Anchored in emerging lessons from an early successful program in Michigan, a group of leaders from health, social policy, philanthropy, and local government across different states met over three meetings to consider approaches for securing bipartisan support and sustainable funding streams—such as the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program—to scale policies toward nationwide coverage. The Room’s policy memo aims to inform development and decisionmaking around potential future national legislation.
Room 1 co-leads: Mona Hanna, Associate Dean for Public Health, Michigan State University; and H. Luke Shaefer, Hermann and Amalie Kohn Professor of Social Justice and Social Policy, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan
Room 2 developed the idea of a new globally coordinated finance mechanism to help feed 100-150 million more children with healthy, sustainably procured school meals by 2030. The Room convened food system and development experts, who agreed on the need to work with the School Meals Coalition to develop new international co-financing instruments that can pool and deploy the international support needed to scale up national school meal programs. The Room’s policy memo developed a technical argument for the finance mechanism, which helps inform coalition efforts moving forward.
Room 2 co-leads: Mohamed Abdiweli Ahmed, Lead, Sustainable Financing Initiative for School Health and Nutrition; Betty Kibaara, Director, The Food Initiative, Africa Region Office, The Rockefeller Foundation; and Kevin Watkins, Visiting Professor, Firox Lalji Institute for Africa, London School of Economics
Room 3 sought to make lead-source testing technology universally available by 2030, as part of a larger goal of a world free of lead poisoning. The group convened public health experts, country-level decisionmakers, and funders active in shaping the Partnership for Lead-free Future (PLF) to consider how to incorporate a strategy for the universal provision of portable X-Ray Fluorescence (pXRF) testing technology within the PLF. Room discussions led to an emphasis on how regional hubs, centrally coordinated by the PLF, could provide low-cost pXRFs, training for authorized users, and technical support for governments, NGOs, and academic partners. The Room co-leads published an op-ed in Project Syndicate capturing this big idea for a global audience.
Room 3 co-leads: Atul Gawande, Assistant Administrator for Global Health, United States Agency for International Development; and Albert Park, Chief Economist and Director General of Economic Research and Development Impact Department, Asian Development Bank
Room 4 built upon previous years’ influential efforts to advance the big idea of unlocking climate education for an additional 200 million students by 2030. In a series of Room meetings, participants with expertise spanning education policy, teacher development, climate learning, and climate finance identified opportunities to better inform climate-related policy decisions. Room co-leads are working on an op-ed to present a roadmap for accelerating and coordinating between education policy, climate finance, and teacher development initiatives and investments in the lead-up to the November 2025 COP30 climate summit in Brazil.
Room 4 co-leads: Andy Cunningham, Global Lead, Education, Aga Khan Foundation; and Lennart Kuntze, Global Head, Climate Education and Leadership, Teach For All
Room 9 considered how to provide roughly 1 billion people with access to a digital ID by 2030. A quick succession of Room meetings connected diverse experts with international experience and perspectives in designing, deploying, and governing digital public infrastructure (DPI) systems. The Room aligned on a set of strategies or “good patterns” to guide governments in the scale-up of trusted digital ID programs that can avoid the pitfalls of state-led surveillance, discrimination, and corporate exploitation and rent-seeking. The Room published a Project Syndicate op-ed outlining the scaling-up of digital IDs across varying country contexts, emphasizing people-centered technical design, proactive stakeholder alignment, low-cost solutions, common governance norms, and sustained international support.
Room 9 co-leads: David Eaves, Co-Deputy Director and Associate Professor in Digital Government, University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose; and Luanna Sant’Anna Roncaratti, Deputy Secretary of Digital Government, Ministry of Management and Innovation in Public Services, Government of Brazil
Room 15 advanced the big idea of global scale-up of interspecies money (IM). In a one-off meeting, a mix of ecology, AI, ethics, and finance experts considered initial IM programs—with gorillas in Rwanda, elephants in India, and trees in Romania—and identified key financial, governance, and technical ingredients for IM to reach 100 species by 2030. Room members brought fresh eyes on the issues to help validate and sharpen technical ingredients for scaling. Room co-leads published a Project Syndicate op-ed “Interspecies money is here” summarizing the core argument.
Room 15 co-leads: Nils Gilman, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President, Berggruen Institute; and Mutesi Rusagara, Minister of State in Charge of Public Investment and Resource Mobilization, Republic of Rwanda
Room 17 scoped an “impact hub” strategy for transforming global maternal health outcomes by 2030. Experts on reimagining global institutions joined with leading maternal experts and practitioners to consider options for ramping up international gains on a lagging global challenge. By applying the principles of an impact hub approach, Room participants homed in on an overarching goal of “zero maternal deaths by 2030” and a community-level metric such as “death-free days” to help motivate and incentivize joint geography-specific efforts across funders, implementing partners, and local communities. Room co-leads published a Project Syndicate op-ed “How to end the scourge of maternal mortality” alongside a summary memo describing key ingredients for advancing the idea.
Room 17 co-leads: Mary-Ann Etiebet, President and CEO, Vital Strategies; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO, New America
Next steps
Amid a period of widespread policy and societal shifts in 2025, we are committed to providing a dynamic platform for elevating big ideas capable of meeting the moment. In this context, we have renewed our conviction about the importance of standardized tools and procedures for bringing diverse teams together. We consistently see the merits of matching supply to demand, by bringing users and supporters together informally, in a neutral space, to shape ideas that can become potential solutions to big problems.
Over the coming year, we will continue to focus on approaches and concepts that meet a big idea threshold relevant to any of the 17 distinct SDGs, even if that means only supporting a select number of Rooms each year, rather than 17 at a time. Meanwhile, we will continue to emphasize the importance of bringing together leaders across the full range of SDG substantive domains, including all the 17 Rooms alumni and partners who form an invaluable community for fostering new forms of collaborative problem-solving.
To this end, we are exploring the possibility of a more immersive “Big Ideas Festival” that could foster deeper forms of cross-Room insight and connections relevant to all 17 SDGs.
Do you have a big idea?
Looking ahead, we are keen to engage with both past and prospective new members of the 17 Rooms community in the pursuit of big ideas for the SDGs. At this stage we are looking for people with a handful of key ingredients:
- A big idea: A bold vision for a mechanism, technology, initiative, or intervention that, if realized, could have a transformative impact on some specific aspect of the SDGs by 2030. The thing need not originate from traditional policy constituencies or be at a particular stage of development—it can be scoped on concept, starting in pilot phase, or already developed or tested enough to be ready for scale.
- A signal of demand: Persuasive evidence that the idea might work—for example, through interest from key validators or decisionmakers, impact metrics from a test run, or simply a well-informed case for how to incentivize uptake.
- Potential allies: Thoughts on good candidates who could co-lead a Room—or at least the types of people who could add value to developing the idea further. Ideally, these partners are from disciplines outside your own and bring a complementary perspective.
- Readiness to “unlock” a next step: The idea is at a stage where the 17 Rooms virtual convening format can open a key door in refining, testing, or advancing an idea. The expert-informed outputs—a sharpened argument and public amplification of the idea—will add value toward next steps.
If you know any people or ideas that might be a fit, please let us know by emailing [email protected]!
Box 1. September 2024 community gathering in NYC
The 2024 17 Rooms community gathering took place on Sunday, September 22, at The Rockefeller Foundation’s headquarters in New York City, on the eve of the U.N. General Assembly.
In what we dubbed as a “curated potluck”—to distinguish our fun and creative approach to convening amid the wide array of UNGA side events—we focused on combining three ingredients to support community experience: high quality and diverse participants, a dynamic meeting design, and permission to think big and bold about SDG solutions.
The program featured a Q&A with Kim Stanley Robinson on “What fiction teaches us about big ideas,” followed by a session showcasing significant achievements from big ideas already in motion—including efforts to harmonize insect-based protein policies in Africa (Room 2, 2022), advancing interspecies money scale-up (Room 15, 2024), and developing strategies for scaling national cash transfer programs to alleviate deep infant poverty in the United States (Room 1, 2024). The final session, “The next big ideas,” encouraged participants to propose audacious yet pragmatic strategies aimed at triggering disruptive innovation through technological breakthroughs, paradigm shifts, and the emergence of new social infrastructure.
In parallel, Room 17 from the 2024 flagship took advantage of a critical mass of Room participants and maternal and child health experts in attendance to arrange an impromptu, in-person Room meeting. This refined the group’s proposal for a new model of impact hubs to transform global maternal health outcomes.
Authors
In Partnership With
-
Acknowledgements and disclosures
This report was prepared by the 17 Rooms secretariat, which is co-chaired by Zia Khan of The Rockefeller Foundation and John W. McArthur of the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. Drafting was led by Jacob Taylor and John McArthur, with contributions from Clea McElwain. Zia Khan, Kevin O’Neil, and Nicole Rasul all provided key inputs. Junjie Ren at the Brookings Institution provided editorial support. Former Brookings secretariat members Alexandra Bracken and Daniel Bicknell provided crucial support to the 17 Rooms flagship in 2024, as did Sarah Geisenheimer and Nathalia dos Santos of The Rockefeller Foundation. Photographs are courtesy of The Rockefeller Foundation. The secretariat thanks Caren Grown for editorial review and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this report. The secretariat further thanks participants in the 17 Rooms 2024 flagship for contributing remarkable ideas and insights, which inspired the contents of this report. The secretariat is particularly grateful to the Room co-leads who provided such energizing leadership, feedback, and support for the 17 Rooms flagship throughout 2024.
The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit organization devoted to independent research and policy solutions. Its mission is to conduct high-quality, independent research and based on that research, to provide innovative, practical recommendations for policymakers and the public. The conclusions and recommendations of any Brookings publication are solely those of its author(s), and do not reflect the views of the Institution, its management, or its other scholars.
Support for this publication was generously provided by The Rockefeller Foundation. Brookings is committed to quality, independence, and impact in all of its work. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment.
The Rockefeller Foundation is a pioneering philanthropy built on collaborative partnerships at the frontiers of science, technology, and innovation that enable individuals, families, and communities to flourish. The Rockefeller Foundation makes big bets to promote the well-being of humanity. Today, The Rockefeller Foundation is focused on advancing human opportunity and reversing the climate crisis by transforming systems in food, health, energy, and finance. For more information, sign up for The Rockefeller Foundation’s newsletter at www.rockefellerfoundation.org.
The Brookings Institution is committed to quality, independence, and impact.
We are supported by a diverse array of funders. In line with our values and policies, each Brookings publication represents the sole views of its author(s).
