Georgetown University Futuro Host

BeNeXT's working relationship with Georgetown extends across three institutional registers simultaneously: through its founders, through its long-standing relationship with Professor Elizabeth Velez of the English Department and Community Scholars Program — a thirty-plus-year Georgetown teacher who carries the institution's commitment to first-generation students into the BeNeXT ledger — and through the institutional relationship that BeNeXT maintained with the late Secretary Madeleine Albright, who served on the School of Foreign Service faculty until her death in 2022. Georgetown sits across the Hilltop and Capitol Campuses in Washington, steps from the nation's center of decision-making, with eleven schools and a global research footprint — exactly the kind of institutional surround a hemispheric leadership institution like BeNeXT was built to translate into the project-author generation.

The institutional foundation under nearly everything else BeNeXT has built. Two founders, a generational faculty relationship, a Secretary of State connection, and a six-year-long working partnership at the convening level. Georgetown is not a host — it is the formation institution behind the institution.

Project authors worked across three Las Americas tracks — Startup, Music, and Science & Engineering — alongside policymakers, diplomats, educators, and organizational leaders. The cohort moved between academic institutions, civic spaces, and federal-adjacent venues in the way only Georgetown's geography in Washington makes possible. Twelve project authors entered the BeNeXT ecosystem through this cycle — several of whom, including Claudia Concepcion, returned years later as legacy architects.

The inaugural Futuro cohort. The institutional template that every subsequent Futuro convening has been measured against. The proof that the partnership between BeNeXT and Georgetown could carry hemispheric leadership development at the convening scale.

A selective cohort of students, emerging professionals, and senior leaders worked through structured design studios, policy-context sessions, and facilitated dialogues — translating values into action within complex institutional systems. The cycle layered visits to the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, NWLC, Earthjustice, the OAS, and the embassies of Mexico, Panama, and the Dominican Republic onto the Georgetown anchor. Twelve additional project authors joined the ecosystem through this cycle.

A second generation of Georgetown-anchored project authors, with clearly defined Legacy Project trajectories and concrete next steps beyond Washington. Twenty-six project authors across the two Georgetown cycles — the largest single institutional footprint inside Futuro itself.

Across two and a half decades, the Community Scholars relationship has remained an active thread of the Georgetown affiliation. Professor Elizabeth Velez — already an institutional anchor for BeNeXT through her thirty-plus years teaching at Georgetown — is herself part of the Community Scholars program, the program where she has cultivated the language, argument, and self-expression of generations of first-generation Georgetown students. Most recently, CMEA invited Hector to deliver the commencement address to the Class of 2025 — the same Center that had selected him as a Community Scholar nearly thirty years earlier. BeNeXT also maintains an indirect affiliation with CMEA's current director, Dr. Charlene Brown McKenzie, who carries the program forward today.

A two-and-a-half-decade personal-and-institutional thread between BeNeXT's founder and the Georgetown program that first identified him as a Community Scholar in 1998 — culminating in the 2025 commencement address invitation that returned that thread to the front of the institution. The kind of relationship that proves how durable Georgetown's hold on the BeNeXT institutional life actually is.