RE LOG Fall 2024

8 Ransom Everglades LOG FALL 2024 Today, though, Williams is looking beyond the foundation model he’s known and spearheaded for the past 19 years to something more relevant to the future and its many challenges. His foundation and its work have already made a massive impact. Now, he wants to bring about a lasting transformation. And he is inviting the next generation to join him in this work. Foundation members called it JHF 2.0. “We’re starting JHF 2.0, which is very much a new movement into what we want to do in the future,” he shared with me on that late May day. We’re sitting at the tables outside the Fernandez STEM Center, a building Williams saw for the first time while attending commencement only days before. “It’s a beautiful building,” he had said when we walked across the Mendelson Family Plaza that stretches beneath the futuristic glass structure. Much had changed since he last set foot on campus as a newly minted high school graduate. Since moving to New York City to pursue his undergraduate degree in finance and management at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Williams has also changed. Among his priorities now is a new, refreshed stance on how he and the thousands of young people that JHF counts among its volunteers can enact positive social change. “Stomping out hunger isn’t necessarily the most efficient and effective way to make a change in the long term,” he told me, reflecting on the foundation’s core driving mission until recently. “There’s a lot of systems that need to be redeveloped and built on top of what we already have, that history and our ancestors have provided us.” Distributing food to those in need, in other words, was an important but incomplete task. He explained that the way the emergency food distribution system works in the United States involves a few very big, very efficient food banks. Globally, there’s enough food to go around (even several times over), but the problem in the U.S. and elsewhere remains identifying those who need those resources, and providing them with food and access to care. This work of identifying need and providing resources, Williams said, often falls on hyper-local food pantries at churches, community centers and schools. These types of organizations can suffer heavily under taxing administrative and operational needs and expenses, and their food distribution mission suffers for it. Williams sees the solution to this problem in young people. “A lot of the issues that we will have in the future are really connected to youth development, making sure that we have the leadership and the training and capacity-building for kids to make a change,” he said. More than ever, then, it’s important to train these leadership “soft skills” early and well. That’s the vision behind JHF 2.0. While continuing its broader commitment to ending hunger, the new, forward-thinking iteration of the foundation will seek to directly address the organizational, distributional and financial factors at the center of that mission. “We want our kids to become consultants and become the administrative arm for our communities,” Williams said. JHF 2.0 also opens its doors, for example, to new technologies like artificial intelligence, which Williams has become more invested in since working in emerging technology at a financial technologies company post-grad. Such technology is a driving interest of current JHF members like Aakash Suresh, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, who was born and raised in Miami. Suresh has worked with JHF for six years – since he was in middle school – and became vice chair in high school when the transition to JHF 2.0 started. Now, he leads an AI team dedicated to streamlining the organization’s processes by proactively predicting hotspots where more resources will be needed. Suresh’s project and trajectory – from volunteer to Junior Advisory Board Member, and now soon-to-be National Advisory Board member and mentor – is proof of Williams’ innovative 2.0 vision in action. During the pandemic, “I think Josh noticed that we were all kind of slowing down and weren’t really communicating with each other,” Suresh recalled. And so, a change was made: “I think “Josh is incredible ... It’s so inspiring, but it actually made me feel like I was part of something, and changing the world. As cliché as that sounds, it made me feel good to be a part of that. It made me feel like I could do something like that, too.” – Mary Logan Woolsey ’22, second from right, student leader at the Joshua’s Heart Foundation