Job Opening: Dream Director

Young Oregonians deserve the inspiration provided by someone always urging them to dream bigger.

Dream Director…it sounds like a job out of some bad movie about Silicon Valley. But it’s an actual position in high schools across the country thanks to The Future Project. According to the Project, “It’s going to take a village to support our nation’s young people in navigating this challenging time.” They’ve created the space and time for that village to form and mobilize behind our next generation.

There’s an immense need for Dream Directors. Too many students (and adults) don’t feel like they have an agency. External factors are seen as too large, too uncertain, and too complex to change, so many of us settle for delegating our agency to others — politicians and influencers (though they are often hard to distinguish), for example. Dream Directors help young folks write a new narrative for themselves and, as a result, society at large.

The Future Project embarked on this bold vision by training a slew of Dream Directors and then placing those Directors in a handful of schools. Directors are meant to coach and train students in living purpose-driven lives that result in better schools in the short-run and better communities in the long-run. In just over ten years, the Future Project has deployed Dream Directors to more than 60 schools in eight states, changing the lives of more than 35,000 students.

If you're still having problems shaking the skepticism that anyone called a "Dream Director" can have a tangible impact, the Future Project has compelling stats to change your mind. Well over 90 percent of the students paired with Dream Directors reported growth in skills critical to living a purpose-driven life, such as leadership. What's more, 90 percent of the schools documented an increase in attendance thanks to Dream Director engagement.

As with most great ideas, the Future Project benefits from its simplicity. Teachers today have too many students (and too many parents) to manage to fully invest in extracurricular ideas. Many parents are similarly strapped for time when it comes to nudging our next generation to dream big. Dream Directors are simply filling a role that we’ve long known is essential to bringing out the full potential in young folks — a mentor that’s ready to listen, inspire, and nurture.

If you think back on your own life, you can probably list someone who had that effect on you. For me, it was Ed Whitelaw. Ed relentlessly pushed me to ask what the heck I was going to do with my life, how I was going to act on the educational opportunities that I had been afforded, and what I was going to do to leave Oregon better than I found it.

We all need an Ed. We all need a Dream Director. Thank you to the Future Project for making this role a reality and please come to Oregon.

Kevin Frazier runs the Oregon Way between classes at the UC Berkeley School of Law and Harvard Kennedy School. He grew up in Washington County and graduated from the University of Oregon. In his spare time, he operates No One Left Offline, a nonprofit focused on closing the digital divide.

"Cinema" by www.haaijk.nl is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0