It Was All a Dream
As a Dream Director and Social Imagineer for The Future Project, one of the country’s fastest growing education innovation nonprofits working with over 30,000 young people in schools nationwide, I spend a lot of time in innovative spaces with big thinkers trying to dream up a better future.
But my experience at the Near Future Summit this past March was at the next level — above and beyond amazing. I met so many dreamers — leaders in technology, medical innovators working on big leaps forward in healthcare, engineers from NASA, and so many more. It was a truly impressive group, and by the simple act of bringing them together in the same inspiring space, the summit achieved something extraordinary.
But as impressed as I was, for me, the best moment of the event didn’t involve any of those people — not the engineers, the medical experts, the next-level innovators or the engineers from NASA.
Instead, my favorite moments happened when I spoke with young people, when I spoke on stage I saw a teen in the front row and and another out in the crowd.
I could not wait to speak to them — as is so common when one takes the time to listen to what young people have to say — that they were as inspiring as anyone else there.
See, even though the attendees and speakers at this summit are some of the biggest thinkers in the world, these young folks had dreams as big as any of them. Moreover, these young folks cared, authentically, about my dreams, even though they barely knew me. I heard their stories and told them about my own path, how I found The Future Project and realized I was a Dream Director.
Young people are special in that they see new possibility in the world everywhere they go, and all they really need to dream big is a space to be themselves, authentically. And someone to remind them that they don’t need to wait for permission from anyone else to change their lives or the world around them.
That’s what my organization, The Future Project, is all about: unlocking the extraordinary passion, purpose, and limitless possibility inside every young person on the planet. Our Dream Directors, now embedded in 50 schools coast to coast, are walking, contagious forces of inspiration who start by asking young people simple questions that are too rarely asked in school:
“What are you passionate about?” “What lights you on fire?” “What change do you want to bring to your school, your neighborhood, your city — the world?”
It turns out that for many young people, all they need is that push — a little spark of inspiration — to get them going, and once they do the results are amazing. Young people in our schools launch thousands of amazing projects every year: from the group of students in Queens who recruited 100 artists to completely reimagine the atmosphere inside their school, to the students in New York and Detroit who teamed up to launch a new nonprofit, to the young woman in Newark who launched a new wellness program in her school.
In the months since the summit — and drawing in part on what I learned and experienced there — I’ve been working with the rest of the Future Project team on an exciting new initiative to think bigger and bolder than we ever have before, by imagining how we can go beyond the schools we’re in today to unlock the potential of any school or student on the planet through a mix of creative funding partnerships, collaboration with other organizations doing this work, and innovation.
Encouragingly, we’re seeing more momentum than ever around the idea that our current system for preparing young people to thrive in the world needs to change urgently — and that we need to better tap into students’ creativity, give them opportunities to build grit, and foster their ability to work together to solve problems in the world.
Forces from across the system are converging around this idea, and the potential to finally make change on this front is palpable.
One great sign of that momentum has been my involvement on a nationwide tour, organized by the XQ Institute, to get the best ideas from people all over the country for how to reimagine school as part of their Super School Project. I’ve been fortunate enough to be invited to participate in the tour this summer as a leader, and so have spent the past few months hearing from dozens of communities about how they are reimagining their schools today, and how they would rethink the institution if they could start from scratch. In every city — from El Paso to Albequerque to Grand Rapids (where I am writing from today) and dozens of others — folks agree on the need to reimagine what education means for young people, and have creative, often inspiring ideas for how to get there.
It’s clear to me that something big is happening. People are waking up to the massive, unrealized potential in many of our schools — and the limitless possibility of the young people inside them.
But even with great momentum, changing that is going to take a lot of work and commitment from a lot of people. As we take on this big challenge, we will need to learn from and call upon leaders beyond traditional education and social change spaces — people like the technology leaders, scientists, innovators and, perhaps one day, even the NASA engineers, who I met at the Near Future Summit. And, equally important, we will need young people like the group who shared their stories with me that day.
I look forward to many more inspiring experiences at the Near Future Summit in years to come.
To read more work from the Near Future Summit, check out the publication on Medium.
