If you were extremely online in the 2000s, or even just mildly curious about YouTube, you probably came across Hank and John Green. Known collectively to their fans as the Vlogbrothers, the siblings helped invent a genre of smart, earnest online video that made space for everything from crash course history explainers to inside jokes about giraffes. Their YouTube channel currently has nearly 4 million subscribers, and Hank and John Green together have more than 4 million followers on Instagram.
Somewhere along the way, their community of “nerdfighters” (that’s what they call themselves), became one of the internet’s most reliable grassroots philanthropic engines. Through their annual Project for Awesome fundraiser started in 2007 (which raised more than $3.5 million in 2024 alone), and the creatively named Foundation to Decrease World Suck, launched in 2012, the Greens and their fans have raised millions for global health, climate equity, and education, often working alongside the nonprofit powerhouse Partners in Health.
I recently caught up with Hank Green to talk about how this all happened, how newer platforms like TikTok have changed how they operate, and what happens when you just maybe stop optimizing for views and start trying to make the world suck a little less. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
What were your early impressions of philanthropy before you got into it yourself?
My parents worked in the nonprofit sector a fair amount. My dad worked for The Nature Conservancy. My mom worked at a science museum for a while and for the City of Orlando, Florida, for a while. So as far as the organizations that were represented in the household, we had a pretty good vibe around them. My mom was also president of Junior League in Orlando for a while. They were involved in nonbusiness ways of interfacing with problems and community and it just always seemed like that was a big part of how the world worked to us.
At what point did you and your brother realize you could fold activism and philanthropy into your YouTube work?
I mean, as soon as we had any amount of power or influence, it seemed, like, good for everyone involved, including us, to start thinking about how to use that power to do interesting and good things. With online video, the thing that initially most interested us about it is that it was a collaborative way of creating, where your audience was a part of it with you. Every video was inspired by the reaction to the last video, in real time. And because of that, it always felt like a project we were doing with people and so it didn’t seem like “OK, how do we turn this thing into our thing that we make bigger.” It was like, what would this group of people do in the world.
That channel, even to this day, the Vlogbrothers channel, has never felt like something that is ours. It feels like something that is owned and operated by this whole community, which is why we give away the money that that channel makes. [A 2022 Vlogbrothers video details how they donate half of their earnings to charity and how they use the other half to support educational projects.] This is a group of people that want to do something together. What’s that stuff going to be? One of the most obvious things for it to be is, how do we turn this community into something that can support the forging of a better world?
So where did “decrease world suck” actually come from? Was it always serious?
I cannot remember. That was very early on. I think that it was just a joke John made, and I, like, ran with it. Even for a little while, we had a world suck meter, like the way the Atomic Bulletin has the seconds to midnight clock. The problem with that is that you never start out low, and you always are going higher.
What were some of your earliest philanthropic interests?
I remember the Indian Ocean tsunami [in 2004]. That was before we started our thing. And I remember thinking, because I saw how the internet was then, how it reacted, that we should have a stake ready to mobilize when there’s a big disaster in the world. And then John noted that the world is very good at responding to disasters that happen on a given day, whereas it’s pretty bad at reacting to disasters that have been happening for decades. That was a big shift in our thinking.
When did it start to feel like this could be more than a one-off internet thing—like it had staying power?
Well, the first thing was the Project for Awesome, which initially didn’t raise money but was just like an awareness-raising function, where we kind of hacked the way that the YouTube algorithm worked, which was very simple back in the day, to get a lot of attention for videos about organizations getting good in the world. As that algorithm got smarter, we turned that into having a big fundraising portion. In 2007, we started that and it’s been going. Then John called me being like, “Here’s what I think we should do. I just got off the phone with Partners in Health. What I think we should do is a long-term project where we try to raise $45 million, Partners in Health will raise some money at the same time, and we will build a maternity center in Sierra Leone, where maternal mortality rate is very high.”
That was John calling me to convince me that this was a good idea, but also confronting the risks of that. You never know what’s going to happen to the stability of that place. Me, I admitted that he knew a lot more about this than I do, and I also trusted Partners in Health. That was a really big shift because it wasn’t just asking our audience for money once in a while, but we were putting a lot of our own money on the line. And also, we are signing on to raise more money than we currently have access to. So where is that going to come from? We had some ideas. Some of them were right. Some of them were wrong.
How would you describe the benefits — and maybe the drawbacks — of doing philanthropy the way you all do it, compared to traditional foundations and institutional philanthropy?
For clarity, I don’t fully know how the institutional models work. But our project thrives on people being connected to it and engaged with it. Asks reinforce the community. If you do a dog food ad, that’s probably going to be a net negative in terms of peoples’ vibes around the thing. But you can say, “Look, not everyone can give, but if you’re considering it, here’s the pitch.” You do have to balance that with the number of times you’re asking, with making it feel like you’re not a member of the community if you don’t have disposable income. You have to make sure you balance your messaging that way, but ultimately, it strengthens the thing to have something that you’re working on together.
Let’s look at it from this angle: With television, there were all these ways that were set up to turn the eyeballs or attention into money. When YouTube came out, and this is still the case, you make way less money per minute of engaged viewing than you do on TV. But I’m less concerned about that money coming to me than making sure that value gets captured so it can do good in this world.
It turned out there was all this untapped potential to be captured and one of the things that was standing in the way was just that advertisements felt kind of icky, whereas advertising a store that gives away 100% of its profit to charity doesn’t feel icky, or advertising the work that Partners in Health is doing and asking for $10 a month. So that basically unlocked a lot of untapped potential in terms of a large group of people coming together to do something that they could not do alone.
You’ve been doing this for a while, and platforms have changed a lot. Given the emergence of faster platforms like TikTok and Twitch, how has that impacted the way you approach philanthropy?
You have to be aware of it. And, you know, I went pretty hard on TikTok to try and understand it and also enjoy it. You have to find the things that work and different things work in different places. It’s really hard to do much on TikTok or on any of these sort of swipeable platforms because it’s so easy for the viewer to disengage before you’re finished giving the pitch. What we actually found success with there was advertising. Because getting organic views was so hard. But if you pay them, they will show it. Early on, it was very cheap to advertise, so we would advertise our 100% profit to charity brands and had a lot of success there. That was part of the way that the Good Store became a thing. Now the advertisements are much more expensive and conversion is lower.
You’ve also been doing some work in the Philippines with tuberculosis lately. Can you talk a bit about that?
A lot of what we do is informed by Partners in Health identifying things that we would never have thought so interesting. It’s such a cool part of life where you think you have a model of the world, and then you talk to somebody who’s an actual expert and suddenly you’re like, “Oh, tuberculosis is still a problem?!” That happened to John a few years ago and he realized it was such a problem that it became kind of life-consuming for him. Not just that TB remains the leading infectious disease cause of death, but also that we’ve been with it for so long and it’s had such an effect on all human societies. But that originally came from just spending time with people who are in it and aware of the problems that exist rather than the problems that get presented through the filter of what is interesting to people, and thus what gets reported on.
You’ve mentioned your brother a few times. What’s it like working alongside him both in the YouTube space but also in philanthropy?
He’s great! He and I are very different and motivated very differently. We keep each other focused in a way that we might otherwise not be. I’m very much more into playing the game of these platforms and getting the algorithms to do what you want them to do. If left to my own devices, I’d probably just go off and get views and let that be the thing that I’m doing. But John has many times kept me focused on, “OK, what exactly do we want to see in the world?” Do we want to be playing the game, or do we want to be accomplishing our own goals? And if we ask ourselves, from some distance, what would our goals be, I don’t think that ultimately we were raised in a way that would just be, how do we get more views? I think our goals would be, how do you leave the world better than you found it? But also, John might not be as good at getting attention on that content as we are as a team.
Looking ahead, what do you think the next chapter looks like? What’s top of mind right now?
I think we keep seeing how the world changes, especially as we see the world changing so dramatically. One thing that I want to keep in mind is that money deployed is almost always better than money sitting in an account. The playing the game part could be, if I just let this grow in my account for a while, I’ll have more to give eventually. But that would also be happening if it’s deployed because there’s a return on the investment once it’s out there. I can just no longer watch the number get bigger in my account and have that control over it. But it’s there in a community that has fewer orphans. It’s there in a community that has less illness so people who can be supporting each other and running businesses instead of being sick or dying or dead. So that money deployed has all of these returns that we just don’t see or appreciate. And so the thing that I’m trying to keep an eye on at the moment, as the largest sort of funding — government funding — is in question or already rescinded, is that money should be being deployed now.
As for five, 10, 15 years, I just have no idea. But I’m ready to see how it changes because I actually don’t doubt that good will still keep being done in big ways. There’s just too much value in philanthropy for it to be abandoned without something replacing it.
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
