Growing Our Board, Expanding Our Perspectives

If there is one thing that has been constant at Imaginable Futures, it is our commitment to learning, growth, and evolution. That commitment applies not only to us as individuals-we are lifelong learners, myself included-but also to our organization.

As IF deepens its work across regions and strengthens its role as a global learning organization, we were eager to bring new voices and perspectives into our governance-people who would challenge our assumptions, bring different expertise and experiences, and help us imagine new possibilities. This is also an extension of our commitment to JEDI: justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

With that, I am excited to introduce Kaya Henderson and Ricardo Henriques, the newest members of our board. Both have dedicated their careers to addressing systemic inequities, particularly in education, and bring extraordinary and distinct experience across sectors.

Kaya is Executive Vice President and Executive Director of the Center for Rising Generations at the Aspen Institute. She previously served as Chancellor of DC Public Schools, where the district was nationally recognized for leading the nation in improved student performance, alongside gains in graduation rates, enrollment, and student satisfaction. She also founded Reconstruction, an educational organization focused on African-American history, culture, and contributions, co-founded Education Leaders of Color (EdLoC), and led the Global Learning Lab for Community Impact at Teach For All. Throughout her career, she has worked to expand opportunities for young people and deliver on excellent education for all learners.

Ricardo is a Brazilian economist and CEO of Instituto Unibanco, a philanthropic organization focused on improving secondary education in Brazil. His career spans academia, government, and philanthropy, including senior leadership roles in Brazil's Ministries of Education and Social Development and the State of Rio de Janeiro. He is also a professor at Fundação Dom Cabral and Board Chair of Amnesty International Brazil. Across these roles, he has worked to advance equity through public policy, research, and collaboration across sectors-including co-developing the extremely impactful policy, Bolsa Familia.

What has struck me most as I've gotten to know both Kaya and Ricardo is their ambition, their determination to create a more just and equitable world, and their willingness to listen to and learn from others. Both understand the importance of bringing different perspectives together, challenging assumptions, and working across sectors to create meaningful change.

I recently sat down with Kaya and Ricardo to learn more about what drew them to Imaginable Futures, what they're excited to learn, and what gives them hope for the next generation. I'm excited to share our conversation.

Amy: While you've only recently joined the Imaginable Futures board, each of you has worked with many philanthropies in a variety of roles. What was it that drew you to joining the Imaginable Futures board?

Kaya: If I am going to be completely honest with you, I had mostly sworn off board membership. I have been fortunate enough to spend a chunk of my career serving on boards for organizations that helped shape who I am and that I care about deeply. That said, as I thought about how to apply my efforts at this phase of my life, I wanted to focus on two things. I wanted to learn more across a variety of fields from people who are experts, and who may not have landed in my network yet. I also wanted to ensure that I could draw a straight line between my efforts and transformative impact on the communities I care about most. Imaginable Futures offers the possibility for both. I simply do not think that we can arrive at the solutions we need for the future if we continue to work in the same ways with the same people. Imaginable Futures can help connect technology, innovation, education, and policymakers to give us an opportunity to create new solutions. That is the work that I want to do.

Ricardo: What drew me most to Imaginable Futures was a combination that I believe is essential for philanthropy today: the ambition to imagine different futures and the commitment to the concrete transformations needed to build them. I was also deeply drawn to its commitment to being a learning organization-one that values and embraces a diversity of perspectives, experiences, and journeys.

Throughout my career, I have learned that tackling inequality requires more than funding strong initiatives in isolation. We need to understand the systems that produce and reproduce inequalities, strengthen the capacity of those who can transform them, and, above all, build solutions alongside the people and communities who experience these challenges firsthand.

I see this perspective very clearly in Imaginable Futures. There is a genuine commitment to equity, listening, and collaboration, combined with a willingness to experiment, learn, and take a long-term view. I am also deeply motivated by the opportunity to be part of a global organization that does not simply seek to transfer solutions from one context to another, but instead learns from different experiences and connects knowledge and insights emerging from different parts of the world. It was this combination of imagination and pragmatism, of a global perspective and a deep understanding of local contexts, that made the invitation to join the Board particularly exciting to me.

Amy: We often talk about being lifelong learners at Imaginable Futures. As you step into this role, what are you most curious to learn? What perspectives or experiences from the regions where we work are you looking forward to better understanding?

Kaya: Every time I launch a new project-from the work we did at DCPS to Reconstruction to my current work at the Center for Rising Generations at the Aspen Institute-I ask, "who has done this before and what can we learn from them?" Too often the people who are placed in roles as leaders feel the pressure to create solutions by themselves. That simply doesn't work. Somebody has tried to solve the problem you are working on before, and the best thing we can do is to learn from them.

So what do I want to learn? I'll give you my answer for today with the caveat that my answer will be different tomorrow.

How do we change school so that it really serves the needs of our students and prepares them for the future? I don't mean how do we change the schedule or the classes. I mean how do we make high school an experience that speaks directly to the needs of individual students, gives them skills and confidence for the future, and prepares them for a job market that none of us can honestly predict? I think the answer involves much more than our traditional schools, so I want to learn about how others prepare students for jobs and how we create coalitions of organizations with an interest in preparing the next generation.

What would learning look like if, instead of starting from the brick and mortar of the school building and the bell schedule of the day, we started with all of the technological assets that we have and constructed a learning experience from that? The answer for using new technology is not going to be plugging new stuff into old structures. It is going to be radically changing the way we think of learning. Who is doing that well? Who are the best thinkers? Where and when can we start?

Individually, we are shockingly bad at predicting what will work. Collectively, and especially when we engage students and their families, we have the potential to come up with amazing solutions. How can we use technology to create broad-based conversations about what young people want and need and use that information to drive solutions?

As you can see though, the theme is bringing more people together to find solutions that do not rely on existing structures and that challenge our assumptions about how we operate. I came to Imaginable Futures to do that.

Ricardo: One of the things that interests me most is the opportunity to learn from contexts that are very different from my own. I have spent much of my career trying to understand and address inequalities in Brazil, and that experience has taught me that similar challenges can take very different forms-and require equally different responses-depending on history, institutions, contexts, and territories.

I am particularly curious to understand how different societies are addressing what I see as one of the central questions for the years ahead: how can we expand opportunities and reduce inequalities in a world undergoing such profound and rapid transformations?

I want to learn, for example, how young people across different regions are experiencing changes in the world of work and the rise of artificial intelligence; what it means for children to be exposed to and interact with these technologies from an increasingly early age; and how they are experiencing the effects of the climate crisis. I am also interested in how education systems are responding to these transformations, and in the new forms of participation, organization, and innovation that are emerging from communities themselves.

I am also very interested in learning from experiences that challenge our assumptions. In both philanthropy and public policy, there is always a risk of approaching problems with answers already in hand. The opportunity to listen to those who are building solutions in different contexts-especially young people, community leaders, educators, and local organizations-is an extraordinary way to broaden our perspectives and deepen our understanding.

For me, being a lifelong learner means preserving the ability to revisit our assumptions and hypotheses. I hope to bring to Imaginable Futures some of the lessons I have learned in Brazil, but above all, I want to discover what experiences from other parts of the world can teach us about building more equitable societies in a rapidly changing world.

Amy: At Imaginable Futures, we spend a lot of time thinking about what could be possible. At a time when the world seems to be changing by the day, what gives you hope? And what do you hope will be different for the next generation?

Ricardo: What gives me hope is not the expectation that things will necessarily get better. For me, hope has much more to do with our ability to imagine different futures and to act in the present to make them possible.

What gives me hope is precisely our human capacity to learn, cooperate, and transform institutions. At different moments in history, we have been able to expand rights, democratize opportunities, and build collective responses to problems that once seemed inevitable. And I continue to see that capacity in younger generations, in communities, in educators, in public leaders, and in so many people who are experimenting with new ways of responding to the challenges of our time.

For the next generation, I hope above all for one thing: that where a person comes from will increasingly cease to determine where they can go. That every child can imagine their future freely, regardless of where they were born, their family's income, their race, or the opportunities their parents had.

I hope the next generation will preserve something that seems increasingly scarce today: the ability to imagine the future as a space of possibility, rather than only as a source of threats.

Perhaps this is one of the greatest challenges we face today. It is not enough to prepare young people to adapt to the world we are leaving them. We need to create the conditions for them to have the knowledge, autonomy, and agency to transform it.

That is the future that motivates me: one in which we can combine extraordinary advances in technology and knowledge with equally extraordinary advances in equity and human development. There is no guarantee that this will happen. But the possibility exists - and that is precisely why it is worth working to build it.

Kaya: I am in the very fortunate position that the experiences I have had in every job that I have done for the past thirty plus years has given me hope. Three experiences have been true throughout my career. First, I have found that there are no intractable problems. There are hard problems and unsolved problems and frustrating problems. There are no problems that we cannot solve. I saw that at DCPS where in less than 10 years we radically changed what students learned, how students learned, and from whom students learned.

Second, there are always people who want to work with you on the hardest problems. All of the best solutions that I have had the pleasure of enacting were co-created, often with folks who previously were not included. The very first thing I did upon launching the Center for Rising Generations was to ask young people what we should do. I am now entering year three of following the plan they laid out.

Finally, I have been fortunate throughout my career to get to spend time with young people. One of the first young people I brought on to the team at the Center for Rising Generations said that the solution to most problems can be found when we combine wisdom and imagination. At this stage in my career, I have accumulated some wisdom and I know enough to turn to young people for imagination.

Amy: Thank you both. I couldn't be more excited to welcome both of you to our board and see how your perspectives, experiences, and curiosity help shape the next chapter of Imaginable Futures and accelerate our impact so all learners have the greatest opportunity to thrive.