Why I am Joining The Future Project;

Mike Basch
3 min readJun 2, 2017

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(and by the way: we are massively hiring)

Coming off a whirlwind of a year — leaving the private sector (Spotad) to work on the Clinton Campaign in Wisconsin, and then running for office for 4 months here in New York — I have spent the last few months deeply reflecting on the right next move for me, professionally.

My natural instinct was to jump back into what I know and love: rapidly growing and scaling a business. However, these are not normal times. With daily headlines calling into question the Future, I feel an ever-growing pressure to maximize my own impact on the Future. I believe the way to affect crucial change is by helping our country’s top talent take the Future into their own hands

Fast-forward to this week, as I close out my fourth day as Chief Business Officer at The Future Project (TFP). My self-proclaimed Futurist outlook put me in touch with TFP a few months back (shout out Erin Hinkle), and as I asked questions and learned more I found we shared a mission and outlook on the world. With a mandate to enable high schoolers to unlock possibility and become agents of change by empowering them to discover their own purposes and passions, The Future Project is reimagining the way high schoolers experience school from the inside out.

What started as an experiment in 2011 by the two founders, Kanya & Andrew, The Future Project today is present in over 50 schools across 7 cities, and has touched over 35,000 high schoolers to-date. I have joined the 105-person team with the challenge of figuring out how we can scale as quickly as possible from the 50 schools we are in today to 5,000 schools tomorrow without compromising the level of impact we have on our students.

This is a challenge I could not be more excited about, but a challenge that I have no intention of accomplishing this alone — we have a dozen positions we are hiring for today, and as I scope out the game plan over the next few weeks/months, there will be many more to come. If, like me, you feel driven to help young people become agents of change in their own lives, and in society at large, I urge you to join us. We’re looking for thought leaders, creatives, coaches, and “architects” of innovation across all disciplines to get involved in empowering the next generation of young people to take the Future into their own hands. Keep an eye out for some incredible opportunities — much more to come!

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