Ten years, a transition, and what comes next
I find myself resisting the usual impulses of these announcements — the summarizing, the grateful enumeration of progress. I want to try instead to say something true.
On June 30, I will step down as Executive Director of Hello Future.
I think these last ten years are as formative for me as our classrooms are for our students. Or maybe it is really a posture I have chosen: to be porous enough to let myself be changed by that which I made. Formation is not just for teens. We are being made, unmade, and remade continuously.
Now that I am at the end, I like to go back to the beginning and marvel at all the things that had to line up for Hello Future to even be imaginable. An attempted coup in Turkey derailed my plans to visit the refugee camps in southeastern Turkey. A good friend said, why don't you go to Kurdistan instead? He shared a Facebook profile of a guy he had met at a cafe there a few years back. I messaged this stranger. The stranger answered and agreed to take me around. I flew to Sulaymaniyah and met him. The "affordable" hotel my new friend chose for me was borderline sketchy, but this was not my first rodeo. It was July and the desert was as hot as you think it is. Ardanlan, now a friend, took me everywhere. Maybe it was his bravado, maybe I looked official enough, but without credentials we managed to gain access to camps where we really should not have been allowed, and sat down with numerous families and individuals for conversations and interviews that laid the foundation for the work that would become Hello Future. It was also on this fortuitous trip that I met our first local partner, STEP, a local NGO. We piloted in their space the following summer.
So many things had to line up in those weeks.
Ten years of this work gave me a front-row seat to an argument I did not know I was building. The rapid advancement of AI has, in its own way, made that argument for us. The conversation tends to collapse into anxiety about tools — which skills will survive, which platforms to teach, how to prepare young people for a labor market being remade in real time. That conversation is not wrong, but it is insufficient. Underneath it sits a more important question. What young people most need from education is not the next skill set. It is the depth of self from which they can learn anything. That is what I remain convinced of. That is what Hello Future has spent ten years building.
Jaya Rupanagunta, our COO for the past three years, will become Executive Director. Jaya helped design the expansion model Hello Future is now executing. She knows what this work requires, and she has been building toward it.
Hello Future is on track to reach 17 partners across 12 countries by the first half of next year. The model has moved from proof of concept to proof of scale. IRC Jordan, now several years into the partnership, is producing outcomes that match what nine years of direct implementation built in Kurdistan. The demand across East Africa, MENA, and South Asia is real. What Jaya is leading is not a startup. It is a field taking shape.
Many of you became friends and allies somewhere along the way. Some of you were that from the start. This is a transition, not a disappearance. Once there is something worth sharing, you will hear from me. In the meantime, you can find me at [your site].
Thank you for being part of this.
Charlie Grosso
Founder & Executive Director (2016-2026)