Impact Dashboard
What you can do to help us reach the North Star
Renee Cummings, Nicholas Thompson, and Vilas Dhar in conversation at JFF’s Horizons summit. Photo credit: Drew Bird | drewbirdphoto.com
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Four Moments That Mattered at Horizons 2025
Speakers on moving past fear, reaching Gen Z, and why humans are at the center of the AI revolution
July 8, 2025
At a Glance
At the 2025 Horizons Summit, leaders shared powerful takes on what it means to Dare To Be Brave in challenging times. Part two of two.
Speakers at the 2025 Horizons Summit, presented by Jobs for the Future, met the challenge to “Dare To Be Brave.” With blunt takes on artificial intelligence and how to reach the next generation of learners and workers, the innovators gathered in New Orleans in June didn’t hold back on what excites them—and worries them—about the future.
“There are eight-plus billion people on the planet, generally with a very strong sense of individual agency and an understanding of our dignity and a pride in the society we’re building,” said Vilas Dhar, president of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. “And then you’ve got maybe a couple of hundred thousand people who work in tech, who have access to massive amounts of capital, sure, that are building products that are splashy launches and everything else, and somehow the rest of us have said, ‘Yeah, they’re gonna figure out what this future looks like for us.’ There’s a real problem to that understanding of what a society looks like.”
Over the course of two days, leaders from across education and workforce discussed the biggest opportunities and challenges facing the country today. JFF also announced exciting progress toward our North Star goal—by 2033, 75 million Americans facing barriers to economic advancement will have quality jobs—and a powerful new partnership for measuring the impact of our collective work to reach it.
Read part two of our wrap-up to discover four more can’t-miss moments from Horizons 2025, featuring Julian Newman, Nicholas Thompson and Renée Cummings, The Just Trust’s Ken Oliver, and National Urban League’s Dennis Serrette. Share your own on social media with the hashtag #JFFHorizons, and don’t forget to look at last week’s first four mic-drop moments.
