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 that’s what the whole reformation to 2.0 has been about: getting to use kids’ passions, and going from a youth-led to a youth-run organization.” While Suresh works on the AI team, others work on finance, marketing, recruitment and more.

The different teams mean that young people joining JHF can learn to do what interests them most, according to director Amanda Avilés, one of the foundation’s handful of staff workers and a long-term volunteer. “Now that we have this system ... if a kid comes in, even if he has no experience or anything, he can say, ‘Maybe I’m vaguely interested in numbers,’ and we can say, ‘Okay, great; we have a finance team or an impact data team.’ Or if they’re outgoing and social, we can tell them about the recruiting or partners and sponsors teams.”

All of it prepares young people to take ownership of the type of leadership Williams was tasked with growing up. Indeed, as he looks back on his own childhood, memories especially vivid on his trips back to Miami, he thinks more often about how founding and leading JHF has impacted his life beyond the rewarding, important and often urgent community work to which he has dedicated so much of his youth and young adulthood.

While his work with JHF meant he sat through plenty of detentions while a Ransom Everglades student  – which he said were “deserved” due to all his absences from traveling the country for different foundation commitments – Williams said the responsibilities he had as founder also provided him with crucial life skills that helped him at Ransom Everglades as much as they’ve helped him now as a New York professional. It was when entering the job world, he said, that he had to remind himself of the skills he had learned as a kid through Joshua’s Heart. 

Williams’ goal for the JHF members following in his footsteps is similar: “We want to train the next generation of leaders, provide them the skills and experience to be capable changemakers,” he said. “Whether it’s going into the sciences, whether it’s going into the government, whether it’s going into communities, they have the core skills, which are really around relating yourself with your community. It’s also about being self-aware and learning how to connect and compete in a way, learning how to learn.”

Still, growing pains abound – both for the foundation’s reimagining, which is still very much in progress, and for Williams. “On a personal level, I think I’ve had issues as I’ve grown up separating the identity between me and Joshua’s Heart, at times,” he said. The foundation has been an integral part of who he is since his pre-school days, and it remains ever present.

While he’s taken a small step back due to his being in New York and working full-time, Williams continues to dedicate much of his free time to the foundation. “I go to work; I go home; I do my work for JHF when I get home. On weekends, I’m usually working JHF, reading or spending time with friends to try to find some balance in life,” he said. “But it’s important to me, and anything that’s important is worth putting the time and effort into it.”

Those who work with him, like Suresh, also attest to Williams’ ongoing commitment to the cause. Suresh describes him as “very involved, especially after he graduated from college”: “When we have major events, like our graduation event in May, he’s there. He tries to make it as much as possible.”

Martin Posada ’18, Williams’ close friend since their days at middle school at RE, agreed, calling Williams a “very committed person. He’s always trying to help the community; it’s something he’s still focused on today.” Added Posada: “After work, he’s still very involved in Joshua’s Heart and new initiatives and everything. Even remotely, he’s still interacting with high schoolers and middle schoolers to drive the foundation forward.”

That was how Mary Logan Woolsey ’22 got to know Williams. She joined the Joshua’s Heart Foundation at the suggestion of Head of School Rachel Rodriguez, who was then head of the middle school. It was 2016 and Woolsey was a sixth grader, a campus away from Williams, a junior at the time. By the time she got more involved in the foundation as a high schooler, joining its Junior Advisory Board, Williams was in college. Still, it was his story that inspired Woolsey to dedicate her time to JHF. 

“Josh is incredible,” Woolsey said, citing his dedication to the sometimes-lofty goal of “stomping out hunger,” JHF’s motto. “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.”

Williams and his mom, Claudia McLean, were not only the dream team at the heart of the foundation, but they also pushed students like Woolsey to take ownership of their potential. When Woolsey was asked in high school to set up her own food distribution site in Coconut Grove – a task that would involve coordinating with the venue, food suppliers and community members – she was daunted. “But [Josh’s] mom really pushed me,” she said. “At the time, it was scary and I was like, ‘Why is she doing this to me?’ But I was grateful … Not everyone gets the opportunity to lead something like that, and be a part of something that’s impactful.”

That distribution site, which Woolsey said she led regularly over two years, was staffed by JHF’s many volunteers and Ransom Everglades students. When she graduated in 2022 and moved to the University of Central Florida, the site’s management was passed down to another Ransom Everglades student, Carolina Hommen ’24, who continued its mission.

Posada, too, fondly remembers volunteering at JHF with his Ransom Everglades friends when he and Williams were in school together. He said they joined, in part, because of their friendship with Williams.

“He didn’t pressure anyone to get involved,” Posada said, “but if you wanted to do it, he was always there and always willing to let friends join and get active.” But while JHF has, in many ways, been Williams’ life work so far, he doesn’t consider it a given or take it for granted. He doesn’t see it as something that was inevitable, either.

“As I got older,” he said, “I realized there is a lot more fulfillment and understanding and … a sense of meaning in following the talents that God has given you ... and really leveraging those to help yourself, help your community and help the world.”

It’s that vision for a future defined by strong and vibrant communities that continues to drive his work with the Joshua’s Heart Foundation and his passionate investment in the next generation of leaders. It’s why he doesn’t see himself stepping back completely any time soon, even as he passes the torch to the next generation. 

“I have a lot of love for it, and I think as JHF grows, the direction that we’re heading towards will be defined a lot by what the kids want,” Wiliams said. “And that’s the way it should be.”