As the recently appointed CEO of Tiger Woods’ TGR Foundation—one of the most ambitious youth education nonprofits in the United States—Hrag Hamalian has reached another milestone in his storied career, or shall we say crusade, to bring meaningful reform to American education. As he takes a moment from the demands of his new position to reflect, it becomes clear that his own story of success was, at once, highly improbable and completely inevitable.
Born in the Middle East, Hamalian arrived in the United States at the age of three when his family fled the civil war in Beirut, Lebanon. By the sheer force of his boundless energy and tenacious altruistic spirit, this son of Armenian immigrant parents, who grew up in the suburbs and attended public schools in New Jersey, has managed to sidestep entrenched institutional norms and reimagine pathways to success among under-resourced children and teens.
From where he sits today, he can identify two factors long overlooked in the great debate about how to level the playing field in educational outcomes for youth: Curiosity and persistence. When describing his own childhood self, Hamalian recounts having been hyper-curious, with a zeal to understand the how and why and ins and outs of everything to which he was exposed. In his view, “If you’re going to teach your child anything, I think it’s how to stay curious and match that curiosity with persistence.”
The persistence part he owes to his ancestors. Hamalian grew up in the shadow of his grandparents’ history. His grandfather, at a young age, navigated a genocide and brought his family to Lebanon and, even without much formal education, started a business there. Growing up with his grandparents in his household meant absorbing something essential about the responsibility to make the most of what you’re given.
Yet Hamalian is quick to point out that his own success was not part of any grand plan when he was growing up. “I think maybe seeds were organically planted in me, because education runs deep in my family.” His great-grandmother, his beloved late aunt Sona, his uncle Artoun, and his aunt Arpi in Canada have all contributed meaningfully to the field of education. Akin to most immigrant parents, his parents encouraged him to pursue what they believed was the highest degree of success: to become a lawyer, a businessman, or a doctor. Hamalian graduated from Boston College as a pre-med student—until he discovered that education was indeed his passion.
The turning point was two years in a classroom. Fresh out of college, Hamalian joined Teach for America and was placed at Locke High School in South Central Los Angeles, considered, at the time, one of the lowest performing high schools in the country. He was tasked with teaching biology to ninth graders—students whose reading levels hovered around second grade. “These kids were just going through the motions with great effort,” he recalls, “knowing there was no opportunity on the other end. And they were wonderful kids and they had wonderful families. It was very difficult to be an active participant in a plan that had no fruitful outcomes for the children I cared deeply about.”
What he saw that year was a structural failure so profound and so visible that it became impossible to walk away from it. He was 23, with only two years of teaching experience, a master’s in Secondary Education from Loyola Marymount, but no formal training in school administration. Yet he possessed what he cheerfully calls “a positive kind of delusion,” to talk his way into starting the Valor Academy charter school. Within two years, it was a California Distinguished School—one of the highest-performing middle schools in Los Angeles, irrespective of demographics.
That was the improbability of it all. “I knew nothing,” he says, “and that’s why I was successful. I was humble enough to walk around and ask kids and parents what they wanted. Also, I was proximate enough to my own school experience as an immigrant kid—I remembered the things that created a climate of success for me and the things that didn’t.”
Over the following two decades, Hamalian built that single school into a K-through-12 network serving 4,000 students through nine schools, went to business school—earning his MBA from UCLA Anderson—to learn how to scale it sustainably—working within the system to effect change from the inside. He then moved to TGR Foundation, first as President of TGR Learning Labs and national programs, before being appointed CEO—the next chapter of a lifelong mission to transform young lives and bring positive outcomes to scale, for maximum impact around the country.
Curiosity is where a passion starts. Persistence is how it becomes transformational. The goal is to push kids through the uncomfortable early stages of a new skill—the phase where everything is challenging and the temptation to quit is strongest—until they reach that moment of genuine self-knowledge.
The TGR Foundation—launched by American golf legend Tiger Woods in 1996—operates what Hamalian calls “opportunity access” education for under-resourced youth. Its first Learning Lab opened over 20 years ago in Anaheim (near where Tiger grew up), followed by a second in West Philadelphia, PA at Cobbs Creek in 2025. The Foundation is now expanding nationally with support from partners, with new labs planned in Los Angeles (Lulu’s Place), Atlanta (Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation), and Augusta (Augusta National Golf Club) over the next two years. The education model is not meant to foster one-off experiences—the centers and programming are designed to lead a student through a learning journey. “We don’t want students to just come one time,” Hamalian says. “Our goal is to stay with students throughout their entire adolescence.”
The model is built around progression: sparking curiosity, helping students find what excites them, and then connecting that interest to the right educational pathways and meaningful opportunities in the workforce.
Put another way, the TGR Foundation is a multifaceted ecosystem designed to connect student interests, passion and aptitudes to careers. Students are invited to discover who they are, what they are good at, and how to get from just dreaming to dream job. Whoever walks through its doors gains exposure and opportunities with the support of an entire team of facilitators, experts, mentors and more. It’s a sense of community aptly expressed in the Foundation’s 30-year anniversary tagline, Driving Dreams Together (Sponsored by EY).
Hamalian explains the model: “We partner with local school districts in under-resourced communities to bring students into our Learning Labs—sometimes for a single day, sometimes over multiple days—where they rotate through hands-on workshops in areas like biotechnology, AI, drone technology, video game design, and multimedia production.
From there, the goal is continued engagement. We want students going home excited, coming back for after-school classes, clubs, teams, studios, and summer programs.
That’s where the real impact happens. At our Philadelphia Lab, for example, our robotics team is now competing with—and beating—teams from far more affluent communities.”
The goal is to find the spark. “We offer a wide range of options so every student can discover something that resonates. And when a student asks for more, the door is open—free of charge. There are no barriers to entry.
That first step can be simple—spending time in the innovatively designed building with communal seating, getting help with homework, or exploring a project in the makerspace or multimedia studio. From there, the journey builds. At every step, there’s someone there to support, encourage, and help students take the next step forward.”
Students can take structured courses which last from 6 to 10 weeks, join clubs, participate in corporate sponsored industry challenges, shadow professionals in industries that interest them, and begin building what Hamalian calls “professional social capital”—the networks and experiences that more affluent kids accumulate on the way to landing their first career-bound job and beyond.
That’s where the sports come in. “Golf is an access sport,” Hamalian explains. “It is part of our model at TGR Foundation. So is tennis, at the TGR Learning Lab Los Angeles currently under development in partnership with Lulu’s Place and the United States Tennis Association.” A student can learn STEAM subjects—science, technology, engineering, arts, and math—but sport is important for holistic wellness and also a channel for building social, business, and professional connections, a networking strategy all its own.
Throughout the conversation, Hamalian returns to those two driving values that has charged his success, curiosity and persistence. They seem to be the animating theory of what the TGR Learning Labs strive to produce. “Curiosity is where a passion starts. Persistence is how it becomes transformational. The goal is to push kids through the uncomfortable early stages of a new skill—the phase where everything is challenging and the temptation to quit is strongest—until they reach that moment of genuine self-knowledge. Sometimes you don’t like it at the end, but at least you did it. Even discovering what you don’t want is progress.”
This reminds him of his own experience exploring careers through the AGBU Global Leadership Program (GLP) as a college student. “I had a wonderful placement in a law firm and the most important thing I learned was that law wasn’t for me,” Hamalian recalls with irony. Nonetheless, he remembers it as “one of the best summers of my life”—not only for the New York City experience, and the lifelong Armenian friends he considers family to this day, but most of all, the chance to meet the woman he would later marry, fellow GLP participant and CEO of Coro California, Natalie Samarjian.
Thinking of his next big challenge, which is scaling TGR Foundation’s programs to reach more beneficiaries in more communities, Hamalian is clear on what drives him. “No matter what I go on to do for the remainder of my life, it will always have an element of social impact. Otherwise, I just don’t wake up energized to do it.”
It’s a statement that makes the best case for why Hrag Hamalian’s success story was inevitable all along.
