ProBono Australia

Heimans has been building movements since the age of eight.

As a child activist he ran media campaigns and lobbied leaders on issues like children’s rights and nuclear non-proliferation.

By 2004, he had dropped out of Oxford to co-found a campaign group in the US presidential elections that used crowdfunding 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, which has since become an internationally recognised social movement phenomenon and has more members than all of Australia’s political parties combined.

In the last decade Heimans has received the Ford Foundation’s 75th Anniversary Visionary Award for his work as a movement pioneer, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader, Fast Company ranked him 11th on their annual list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business and the Guardian named him one of the 10 most influential voices on sustainability in the US.

Heimans, who is originally from Sydney but who now lives in New York, is also the man behind Purpose, which was launched in 2009 as a home for building 21st century movements and ventures that use the power of participation to change the world.

It harnesses what Heimans calls “new power” to work with leading organisations, activists, businesses and philanthropies to put purpose and participation at their core.

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