As intolerance and extremism increase, High Resolves teaches high schoolers to rise above.

This personal experience of persecution drove his graduate studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, the ideas in his international bestselling book, As One, and his deep fascination with collective action and growth all through his professional life. It also led to the birth of High Resolves, which is founded on the idea that society must focus on educating people in the qualities of good citizenship. 

Being a good citizen is not intuitive. “When we speak with people who see themselves as global citizens, they frequently refer to some peak experience during their youth that transformed the way they thought about the world,” says Mehrdad. “Our theory of change holds that for personal transformation to be sustained, there need to be an ‘ah-ha’ moment that shifts belief and motivation, which is then hardwired into long-term memory through repeated practice and application over time.” Moral education, Mehrdad believes, is what is required to “immunize” us against the blind prejudice that feeds human unkindness, and leads to human atrocities.

High Resolves enlists the natural passion of young people to make change, through a curriculum designed to build mastery in the core competencies of social justice and citizenship. Interactive, simulation-based workshops provide peak experiences for participants that challenge and shift their existing beliefs about the world, like the High Resolves exercise Find My Peeps, which exposes biases about identity, race and social constructs. These are reinforced and deepened by learning in the classroom, and by real-world applications like social action projects in the students’ communities, or Videos for Change, a televised competition where Australian students bring awareness to an issue through storytelling.

The story of Mehrdad’s journey from a nine-year old immigrant, to the pinnacles of private-sector success, to High Resolves, a venture which has the potential to change the world, is a powerful one.

Despite those difficult childhood experiences, his family life was solid. “My mother was meticulous,” he says, “incredibly ordered in her thinking and in her approach to service and work, and I think she bred in me and my sisters a conviction about doing things right.”

This conviction bore fruit in Mehrdad’s multiple degrees, always with distinction, culminating in a juris doctor in law. What stands out in hindsight is a period at Harvard Kennedy School during which he worked under Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling to study the emergence of cooperation using simulations. Mehrdad became fascinated by how people learn to hate, and conversely, by what cognitive skills could help protect them from bigotry, prejudice and corrosive ideologies. “I realized these games had power,” Mehrdad says, “we had stumbled upon a modern approach for a moral education.” It was a new idea, but one which resonated: the simulation was ultimately offered at the Business School, Law School and Kennedy School, and incorporated into the curriculum of 120 schools in Ontario. The seed planted at that time has today grown into one of the key building blocks of High Resolves.

After graduation, the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company snapped up the young Mehrdad. Although he laughs about having “disappeared into the corporate vortex” for about 10 years, he is grateful for that period. Co-leading McKinsey’s global growth practice, amongst other things, gave him profound insights. “It’s been central to how we have perceived the possibilities of High Resolves,” he says. 

In 2005, Mehrdad became a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. For him, the charge put forth by the Fellowship—to create an enduring enterprise that makes a significant difference to society—was a clear call to action. Now, married with a son and living in Sydney, Australia, he was adamant that whatever he built would not be another thing to take him away from his family.

So Mehrdad sat down with his wife, Roya, to explore options. Their thoughts turned to their son’s school in inner Sydney, and what they perceived to be an absence of citizenship training. They recalled the simulations from Mehrdad’s time at Harvard. Would these still be applicable? Their son’s school granted permission to run a pilot. The response was encouraging. It became clear, however, that a comprehensive and contemporary curriculum was needed, and so the two of them decided to create High Resolves. “One school became five,” says Mehrdad; then 15, then 20; some 13 years later, High Resolves is in more than 350 Australian high schools, and has launched in the US, Canada, China and Brazil. 

Naturally, along the way, there have been some of what Mehrdad calls “near-death experiences.”

Initially, High Resolves did not charge schools for the implementation of the program; it was fully funded by Mehrdad and Roya themselves. Later on, some corporate funders joined. “But the more schools we added, the bigger the funding gap became.” By 2011, it became clear that the team had to rethink the paradigm. Mehrdad and Roya devised a payment model which allowed growth to continue, and crisis was averted as additional revenue streams opened up. 

“In terms of software design and user experience, the Composer is revolutionary. If we are being thoughtful about the right organizational structure for this to thrive, it doesn’t really fit in a not-for-profit. It wants to be out there, so in the next months we are considering spinning it out as a for-profit tech venture in Silicon Valley.” This could be a clever way to generate an endowment to sustain and grow High Resolves

Mehrdad and High Resolves have ambitious goals for the next five years: 20 to 30 hubs in the US; 20 more countries working with High Resolves; Videos for Change having a global momentum of its own; and the Composer used in tens of thousands of places.

But what most excites the team is the profound, personal impact the program has on young people. One graduate in Sydney, Annie, the daughter of an immigrant family from China, explains: “I was trying to figure out who I was, what I liked, what I thought was important in society. High Resolves taught me how to approach situations where there's evidence of inequality and that I can, in my own capacity, make a difference.” Annie attributes a shift in her own self-belief, and her pursuit of a career in shaping policy to support those most in need, to her experience with High Resolves.

It’s people like Annie who inspire Mehrdad. “What makes me hopeful,” he says, “is that I can see the change happen with one person. And then, when you see it happen with one, you see it with dozens and hundreds and thousands. I think in some ways what we do at High Resolves is we lift the trajectory of people's lives and point them towards what they were meant to do on this planet.”