Achievement Unlocked: A goal-crushing year for impact in the SU Community.

There’s a time for calm, collected retrospectives, and then there’s a time to just step back and say “Daaaaaaamn.” Looking back with an eye on the Singularity University community in 2017, I’m opting for the latter.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing a series of posts about what’s happening at Singularity University in the world of impact as we round the bend into 2018. In this annual time of introspection, we’ll celebrate some big news from 2017, feature a couple partners who are making waves in our network, and will invite you to join us in setting some goals for 2018.

So let’s do the numbers and kick things off with a hearty round of applause going out to the SU community all around the world, the people who drive the big vision behind Singularity University to use technology to positively impact lives and tackle the world’s greatest challenges.

The Singularity University community grew to 158,000 people in 127 countries.

Impact is driven by our community, individuals taking action by applying exponential technology to global grand challenges in startups, corporations, NGOs, governments, academic institutions, funding organizations, and their own neighborhoods. By the end of 2017, the community was growing by about 5,000 people per month, and our 100th Chapter just launched in December.

And that community of action has taken on a reported 5,069 impact initiatives.

We encourage everyone in our community to pursue what we call an “impact pathway,” one of six journeys to use technology and address global challenges in different ways: create a new organization, innovate within your existing organization, launch an education and awareness campaign, influence policy, pursue research and development, or mobilize resources.

But why is this so cool?

Several years ago, we set a goal for our community to launch 1,000 initiatives along these pathways by the year 2020, and it’s pretty dang exciting to have that goal blown out of the water three years early, five times over.

But 10x would really be better.

More on that later.

Get involved yourself at singularityuglobal.org.