McNulty Foundation & Aspen Institute Announce the 2018 McNulty Prize Winner, Mehrdad Baghai and High Resolves
The McNulty Foundation and the Aspen Institute today announced Mehrdad Baghai and High Resolves as the recipient of the 11th annual John P. McNulty Prize for extraordinary leadership. Baghai is being honored for creating High Resolves, which delivers learning experiences to inoculate students against hatred and galvanize them to take action in their communities. Co-founded with his wife Roya, High Resolves is bringing immersive, experiential citizenship education to thousands of youth across Australia, North America, Asia and South America.
“Around the world, we are seeing a rise in hateful discourse in communities and at the highest levels,” said former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, chair of the McNulty Prize jury. “High Resolves is tackling these pressing issues head on by training the next generation to resist propaganda and division and stand up for what’s right. It is a program we urgently need right now.”
What began 13 years ago in a single school, is now in over 350 schools across Australia, and expanded to hubs in Oakland and New Orleans, and in Canada, China and Brazil. In Australia alone, the program has engaged over 200,000 young people, or 4% of all high school students, and is on track to reach 50% of all Australian high schoolers in the next five years, impacting the next generation at an unprecedented scale.
“We’ve all been taken aback at how prejudices we thought were on the way to extinction have been revealed as alarmingly prevalent. High Resolves has done the very difficult task of building a self-funding model that challenges that kind of thinking...