At a time when so many people feel powerless to help themselves or each other, Schmidt Futures strove for the opportunity to serve. Last December, their year-end letter predicted that "if 2017 at Schmidt Futures was about vision, 2018 experimentation, and 2019 a reengineering for scale, then 2020 will be about delivery and courage." TheISF-North America 2020 cohort worked on a variety of important current issues, including but not limited to: helped more than 300,000 healthcare workers, 850,000 patients, and 3 million families in the first few months of COVID-19 through open-source medical supplies, PPE acquisition and distribution etc.; launching two "virtual institutes" of science across 20 institutions worldwide which focused heavily on climate change; assisting 8 million people start the voter registration process ahead of the 2020 U.S. elections.
Reid Pauly was among the 27 fellows in the cohort to work on each goal.