High Resolves Group

Overview

High Resolves Group was founded by Iranian-born Australian entrepreneur Mehrdad Baghai and his wife, Roya. ² Baghai identifies as a member of the Baha’i faith, and says his family fled Islamic religious persecution in Iran when he was nine years old, creating a lifelong interest in promoting religious and ethnic tolerance. ⁵ High Resolves and its flagship Videos for Change initiative are an outgrowth of Baghai’s experiences. ^{5  4}

Baghai is the former co-lead of McKinsey and Company’s global Growth Practice, the founder and former co-chair of consultancy Alchemy Growth Partners, and a former executive director of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), the country’s equivalent to the United States’ National Science Foundation. ^{6  7} He is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute and was named a “social entrepreneur of the year” by the Schwab Foundation, which is a sister organization to the World Economic Forum. ⁷

High Resolves is a registered Australian nonprofit based in Ultimo, New South Wales.  ⁸ It has Deductible Gift Recipient status under Australian law, equivalent to American 501(c)(3) charitable tax status. ⁹ However, according to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission’s online National Charity Register, High Resolves has not filed a required Annual Information Statement or financial report with government regulators since 2022. ⁹

High Resolves America

High Resolves’ American subsidiary is High Resolves America, a Los Angeles-based 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofit. ³ In its filings with the Internal Revenue Service, High Resolves America says its charitable mission is to develop middle and high school students as “individuals that act in the long-term, collective interest of humanity.” ³

In 2022, High Resolves America received a grant from billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. ¹⁰ It has also received funding from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and took funding through crowdfunding platforms and donor-advised funds such as GS Donor Advised Philanthropy Fund For Wealth Management Inc., the Charities Aid Foundation of America, and the PayPal Charitable Giving Fund. ¹¹

Programs

Two programs listed on High Resolves’ website, the “Human Responsibility Accelerator” and “The Learning Network,” no longer have active websites. ^{12  13  14}

In 2022, High Resolves set up ULTIMO/Studios, a for-profit subsidiary that develops and manages the video production and sharing technology platforms used by its flagship program Videos for Change. ¹⁵

High Resolves’ primary project is Videos for Change, which offers short-form video production tools, curricula for schools, and video distribution platforms to students 13 and up around the world.  ¹

Videos for Change grew out of High Resolves’ in-classroom programs that had more than 200,000 students in more than 350 Australian schools, using curricula originally designed by Mehrdad Baghai for his son’s school that drew both on his own personal experiences as a member of a persecuted religious minority in Iran and his studies at the Harvard Kennedy School with Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling. ^{4  16}

It operates a “Global Film Festival” of one-minute videos produced by Videos for Change participants aged 13 to 25, in which students discuss a topic that they hope will “inspire social change.”  ¹ As of the beginning of 2026, creators from 24 countries had submitted videos to the project’s ‘Global Showcase.’ ¹⁷

Funders and Supporters

The High Resolves Group has received funding from the Omidyar Network, Schmidt Futures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the McNulty Foundation. ¹⁸

Other partners include NBCUniversal International Networks, the National Geographic Society, University of Technology Sydney, and The University of Newcastle, Australia. ¹⁸