#frameworkchange

We came together and starting asking our friends if they’d be interested. On a Sunday afternoon, about 95 people came together to start The Future Project. We didn’t know what it was exactly; at that moment, it was more a set of questions we had than anything else. 

What emerged was that there were three things that were driving us that we wanted to solve. The first was that—just as there’s this narrative about unmet student potential—what if we were to think about schools as having potential that’s not being met? I don’t mean that they’re failing to reach their current appointed set of metrics: I mean a deeper level of potential. Think about schools for a moment: they’re most extraordinary places on Earth if you think about it. When it comes to high school, you have all these young people in a confined environment for four years. What can we do with that? What if schools were to become true engines of human possibility? Engines where young people think about what they’re passionate about, and use that passion to change their world, change their schools, and change their lives. We wanted to figure out how to truly transform high-school at the most formative moment of a student’s life into an extraordinary and inspired place to be: one that can light a fire underneath everyone in it. 

The second thing was a question of scale. I’d spent a lot of time with social entrepreneurs in the education world, and we were constantly wrestling with the fact that while we have these amazing models, we have yet to create something that can ultimately get to—say—all high schools, or all elementary schools within a reasonable amount of time. We wanted to create something that could reasonably meet that goal within 20 years. 

The third thing that was on our mind was a question of not just schools and scale, but service. We have tens of millions of people who want to do something. The challenge is how do we get them to do something that’s actually meaningful? 

So we started The Future Project. We started in three cities, and we were working with about a thousand people in the beginning, with the help of a volunteer team of about a 100-200 people who were helping to start it up. 

We started to ask students how they would create The Future Project. What emerged really became our model. 

We’ve created this character who works with students called the Dream Director. The Dream Director is an entrepreneur who goes into a school, partners with all of the principals, teachers, and students, and helps to create a cultural phenomenon in that school, where it becomes an incredibly inspiring and imaginative place to be. 

The second thing they do is to work individually with students until they’ve reached every single student within a school, helping them take on this new identity of a dreamer, and to launch a project and use it to in some way change the world. In doing that, we’ve been very inspired by what Peace First does. You have as a result these incredible, imaginative projects that begin to emerge. There have been more than 700 examples so far of students exercising and fulfilling their passions. I don’t necessarily mean passion for social change.

There’s one student who has a passion for coffee, and is using that passion for coffee to begin to raise awareness for his other passion, which is swimming. He’s working to somehow combine those things to create a coffee-swimming club at one of the lowest performing schools in all of Connecticut. Students come up with the most amazing, crazy ideas, but the key is that they’re taking on this identity of what it means to be a dreamer. 

It’s been a fascinating experience, because we’re starting to get teachers and principals asking for this, saying that they’re sick of the school reform efforts that are telling them that they’re wrong, that they have to change everything. We’ve had 1,000 principals and educators across the country reaching out to us. Just the other day, on Sunday night, the Mayor of New Haven got up and declared New Haven a Dream City, and closed the streets of New Haven to a parade of dreamers. 

We recently purchased the url “dream.org”. An astrology company had gone defunct, so we swooped in and got a 90% discount because of our cause. We own that site, and we’re trying to figure out what exactly we’re going to launch on August 28th, which is the 50th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech. We’re thinking about how to put that call to young people and say, “You have a dream,” and, “What will you do about that?”

Since I’m young in this and we’ve only been going a year and a half, I don’t think the question at all is what I, or The Future Project, would do. Someone recently said to us as we think about this campaign that if we’re really real with ourselves, what we want—not just we as The Future Project, but everyone in the social change sector—is to reach billions of people. That’s the scary thing when it comes to knowing whether we’re ever successful, because there are always more people to reach, always more minds to change, more norms to change. 

And we thought about that for a second: billions of people. Who’s done that before? When you look at it, you realize there are only three entities in the world that have reached a billion people, in terms of creating a common sense of identity: Christianity, Islam, and Facebook. Consider it for a moment: Mark Zuckerberg meets Saint Paul. 

Of all the questions that are on our minds right now, there are four questions that I want to pose to the group, because we don’t have the answers. What we have is an intention, and an understanding that there’s this incredible opportunity to create a common call to action, and to get young people, and all people, to begin to realize that they have this extraordinary potential to reshape their present reality and create a future that begins right now. 

As we think about storytelling, the first question is, “What would Ben Franklin do?” I don’t think we have to look much further than Ben Franklin to figure out how to change the world and to change the norm. If you think about that image in history class or high-school of the “Join or Die” snake—thirteen colonies and the words, “join or die,” and that says it all. There are so many things that come up when you consider how Ben Franklin made change, starting with the fact that he knew how to use an image. It was Ben Franklin who mastered what it takes to create a common identity, who defined, with an image, what it is to be an American. He drove forward the concept that what tied us together as colonies was our identity as Americans, and which had a profound impact on our winning the Revolutionary War. 

The other part about Ben Franklin that’s interesting to think about is the way the he told stories. He was a storyteller. Twenty-five years of his career were spent as a journalist before he went on to do everything else. He paid close attention to what was being said to, and by, the “middlings”: ordinary people leading ordinary lives. What was being spoken about at the pig roast? What are people thinking about and saying to each other as they wake up in the morning? In the school context, what’s being said in the lunchroom and the hallways? How do you reach those people, and at the same time, reach those who are influencing policies? He established a common thread that allowed him to speak to both audiences simultaneously.  

Question 2 is, “What would Saint Paul do?” If we really want to think about something that has lasted beyond itself, that’s bigger than the organization, look at how Saint Paul managed to market Christianity. Religions have branded themselves extraordinarily well; what are religions but a set of beliefs and values and stories? It’s all about narrative change. 

The third is, “What would Steve Jobs do?” When it comes to social change, there’s something we can learn from Steve Jobs about creating solutions and ways for people to take part that are sexy, easy, simple, and magical, and that aren’t in any way cumbersome. It’s about putting the burden on the design team, and the creators to figure out how to make it incredibly easy to engage, to figure out how to transform your school into a place of dreamers, or any cause. When it comes to developing a product, how do you create the one thing everyone can gobble up, that’s a Trojan Horse for everything else, and that allows us to avoid dwelling in the world of abstractions?

And finally, “What would Bob Dylan do?” How do we create something that makes it cool and revolutionary? How do you create that phenomenon not through traditional means, but through organic means: music and the kind of things that come from the spirit. 

So that’s what I’ve got: questions, not answers. Underlying this entire issue is how we bring a sense of common purpose to all of this: rather than having a thousand different causes, what will it take for all of us to unite behind one cause? We’re talking about dreamers, Peace First is talking about peacemakers, and others have their own language, but what we’re all really talking about is the same thing. How do we seize the momentum we’re all feeling, and catalyze a real paradigm shift by finding a singular way to redefine possibility: one that doesn’t have any sacred cows? If we can do that, we can do anything. 

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