He still doesn’t know it, but Sir Bob Geldof--the legendary punk rocker and founder of Live Aid—inspired PACT!s first initiative of 2026. Here’s the story:
At a speech Sir Bob delivered at the One Young World Summit last year in Munich, he was discussing PACT!’s “Break The Hate Challenge,” in which he served as a judge.
During said speech, he expressed a tinge of disappointment in some of the 321 entries we got. To wit:
“I was sort of disappointed, because amongst you lot, you are very smart people…I was hoping there was some sort of tech geek who could fuck with the algorithms you know so when you see a message of hate, (you could) get in there and pervert it slightly… which is deeply annoying.
“And when you annoy people, when you irritate theme, you’re the grit in the oyster. And always remember, it’s the grit that makes the pearl.”
(You can check out the clip from that speech right here; it’s about 90 seconds long starting at 14:20)
So with that as inspiration, we launched the “Be The Grit Challenge” at the E-AI Conference in Montreal in March.
In a nutshell, we’re asking participants to design some sort of AI tool that doesn’t merely identify hate speech, but hunts it down and scrubs it clean for everyone to see. On Instagram, X, on websites… anywhere where bad guys gather to spew.
Be The Grit is not a hunt for riches or a platform for glory, but calling to one’s soul, for a chance to do good on an epic scale…but anonymously. The ultimate winner (because the deadline is the end of June) gets $5,000…and a pledge that we’ll show it to Sir Bob at the next One Young World event, this time in Cape Town South Africa in November.
For this, there’s no standard “entry form” or submission doc per se. Send us something easy to understand and steadfastly convincing. A demo or MVP would be helpful…as would the spirit of a pirate and the audacity of a crypto bro.
The winner will be chosen by people from PACT!, and E-AI, with the criteria being a mix of how credible your plan is, and how fast you can pull it off.
Send whatever you can convince us with to curious@thepowertoact.org. Deadline for submissions is Tuesday, June 30.
So…wanna make some trouble and the world a better place at the same time?
Then be the grit!