FOUNDER/EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR (2016-2026)
Charlie Grosso founded Hello Future in 2016 and led it for ten years. The organization started its work with refugees and underserved youth via direct implementation in a refugee camp in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It now scales worldwide through partnerships with local and international orgs.
The work has a long history. Charlie's grandparents fled mainland China for Taiwan in the 1940s, political refugees who left everything and rarely spoke of it. What carried forward wasn't the story but the residue of it: hand-me-down clothes, a waste-not discipline, the way displacement sets a family back for generations. Charlie was born in Taiwan and sent to the US as a teenager with a suitcase and her ABCs. That displacement taught her more about the youth Hello Future serves than any credential could.
Before this, Charlie spent twenty-five years as an entrepreneur and creative professional, starting her first business at twenty and building a career as an advertising photographer for clients including Lexus, Nike, and Comedy Central. Travel to more than eighty countries sharpened the rest. That background is not a detour from the work; it's where the work's method comes from: the instinct to build systems, to treat young people as capable rather than in deficit, to design for self-reliance rather than rescue.
Charlie is a fellow of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, the Kravis Leadership Institute, Acumen, and the Boehm Fellowship.
Charlie continues to write and work independently. Find her at charliegrosso.com.