The Future Project
The Future Project is an American non-profit organization that challenges young Americans to discover their passions and change the world.
In its pilot phase, The Future Project worked with urban public high schools, embedding in each school a full-time Dream Director, a new position that the organization designed with experts. As of 2014, The Future Project is working with 25,000 students across New York, New Haven, Washington, DC, Newark, San Francisco, and Detroit. In 2014, Andrew Mangino, co-founder of the organization, was named an Ashoka Fellow.
History
Andrew Mangino and Kanya Balakrishna met through their work at Yale Daily News. After graduating from Yale in 2009, both moved to Washington, D.C. to take on positions as speechwriters in the Obama Administration. While living in DC, they developed the idea of The Future Project after speaking with friends and educators who told them that the students in general were not inspired. In October 2011, they built a volunteer team of fifty people and launched the project.
Model
The Future Project recruits staff members called Dream Directors and trains them at a summer Dream Academy, deploying one to each partner high school. The Dream Director begins with a listening tour of students, faculty, and community members and then helps to craft one project for the school. Upon doing so, they build a Dream Team of students, charged with responsibility of carrying out the project in addition to their own personal "passion-based" projects. As students launch projects, they’re matched with Dream Coaches from the community who help them in the projects. The Dream Director works full-time in a school in partnership with faculty and community volunteers to engage students more in these projects, and to help them.
Funding
The Future Project is funded primarily by private individual philanthropic donations and small to medium foundations as well several institutional partners, including Quicken Loans, Google, Blackstone, and Yale University. The organization received $15,000 from a Yale philanthropy class and raised $5 million in its first two years. In spring 2013, the organization won Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation grant, which is given to the top 1% of emerging social enterprises each year; and also received a grant from the Arbor Brothers and the Heckscher Foundation.