IDEAS Summer 2016 by Kissane Viola Design

SOCRATES TURNS 2O

Two Decades of Young Leaders URBAN UPGRADES

Aspen Challenge Dares Teens to Reimagine Their Cities

WILD RESTRAINT China and Africa Unite to End Poaching

PLUS: Fellows Make Going Green Corporate Policy

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SUMMER 2016

CONTENTS

F E AT U R E S 46 | WHERE THE WILD THINGS WERE Africa’s wild elephants and rhinos are facing extinction from illegal poaching and a thriving pipeline between Africa and Asia. That’s why China is working with the African Union to curb the ivory and rhino-horn trade. Chinese and African officials are looking at how to make conservation policy part of the Chinese government’s recent—and substantial—investments in Africa. David Monsma and Nicole Buckley examine the Institute’s role in bringing these two delegations to the table, leading the discussions, and saving wildlife. 50 | 20 YEARS OF NEW LEADERS AT SOCRATES The Socrates Program, one of the Institute’s most dynamic projects, pushes young leaders to reconsider their places in society as trailblazers in corporate America, education, economics, politics, journalism, and law, among other areas. This year the program celebrates 20 years of encouraging participants to use their energy and talents to make lasting and positive impacts. Alison Decker supplies the history; participant Bill Resnick remembers his favorite Socrates moments; and founders Laura and Gary Lauder and William D. Budinger look back at 20 years of fiery discussions with some of the world’s most exciting thinkers and look ahead to topics that cut to the core of modern life, like technology, race, energy, and privacy—and, of course, more opportunities to connect on Aspen hiking trails and in venues across the globe. 58 | BE THE SOLUTION The Aspen Challenge is a contest that empowers high-school students to initiate the changes they want to see in the world. This year the Challenge went to Chicago and returned to Washington, DC, to ask teenagers to reimagine their urban enclaves—from redesigning play spaces to creating farm-to-city markets to leading financial-literacy clinics—and then launch their projects in the real world. Sacha Zimmerman introduces the initiative and the inspiring young people who won the latest challenge—and who will share their projects at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

THE JOURNAL OF IDEAS 62 | RESTORING THE GRAY ZONE The United States became the nation it is today thanks to a pursuit of freedom of religion. Yet terrorism, fear, and culture wars have all led to more divisive black-and-white thinking about religion—and less tolerance. But in the gray zone, religious diversity is a strength, not a point of contention. Meryl Justin Chertoff explores the work of the Institute’s Inclusive America Project. 6 6 | H OW TO W I N T H E L AT I N O VOT E With two million more Latinos eligible to vote in this year’s presidential election than in the last, whichever political party manages to harness Latino voting power could be the difference between going to the White House or going home. Matt A. Barreto and David Damore do the math. 2

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

SOCRATES TURNS 2O

Two Decades of Young Leaders URBAN UPGRADES

Aspen Challenge Dares Teens to Reimagine Their Cities

WILD RESTRAINT China and Africa Unite to End Poaching

PLUS: Fellows Make Going Green Corporate Policy

ON THE COVER Elias Okwara, a fellow with the Global Governance Institute, unwinds with participants at a 2014 Socrates seminar in Aspen.

Â© John Dolan

How Will You Shape the Future?

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CONTENTS DEPARTMENTS 6

| W H AT I S T H E I N ST I T U T E ?

13 | A R O U N D T H E I N ST I T U T E The Institute launches its Forum on Women and Girls; Darren Walker receives the Preston Robert Tisch Award in Civic Leadership; leaders from the art world learn the business side of foundation work; the Institute asks what makes an American; and much more. 6

30 | A S P E N L I B R I S The Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series features Michael Eric Dyson, Melanne Verveer, Garry Kasparov, Diane Rehm, Evan Thomas, among many others. 32 | L E A D I N G VO I C E S Eric Motley, of the Institute’s newly renamed Department of Institutional Advancement, talks to David Rubenstein, one of America’s leading philanthropists, about forming partnerships as part of contemporary giving and ensuring projects are meaningful. 36 | I M PAC T Young writers join the Arts Program each summer in Aspen for a special seminar to think about how their work engages with society and to be mentored by some of today’s most vibrant literary voices; three young artists reflect on the effect the program had on them. Members of the Aspen Global Leadership Network often leave their Fellowships inspired to take on the today’s most pressing challenges; three Fellows from different parts of the world share how they are leveraging their businesses to make an environmental impact.

70 | FAC E S

Behind the scenes at Institute events. 76 | I N T E R N AT I O N A L PA R T N E R S Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko meets with the Institute’s Elliot Gerson to discuss the work of Aspen Institute Kyiv; European partners meet to examine both the Syrian refugee crisis and energy security; India brings Aspen seminars to its police force; and more. 79 | O U R S U P P O R T E R S Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson underwrite the Great Decisions Series; Al and Gail Engelberg support the Aspen Health Strategy Group. 82 | FAC TS

Get to know the Institute’s programs. 96 | CO N N E C T W I T H U S

Contact our program directors; get in touch on social media. 100 | L A ST PAG E Walter Isaacson and Henry Crown Fellows tackle Mardi Gras.

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32 36

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CONTENTS

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WHAT IS THE ASPEN INSTITUTE?

The Aspen Institute is an educational and policy studies organization headquartered in Washington, DC. Its mission is to foster leadership based on enduring values and to provide a nonpartisan venue for dealing with critical issues. The Institute has campuses in Aspen, Colorado, and on the Wye River on Marylandâ€™s Eastern Shore. It also maintains offices in New York City and has an international network of partners. 6

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EDITOR'S LETTER Ideas animate the Aspen Institute. They’re its lifeblood. Every policy program, every public program, every event that takes place in and around the Institute’s campuses, meeting rooms, and friends’ tables is aimed at finding, listening to, and engaging with new ideas. So when we were recently looking for a new name for the launch of the first issue of our new three-time-a-year frequency, we didn’t have to look far. Ideas are what we brings you in every issue—particularly in The Journal of Ideas (page 61), our magazine-within-a-magazine that shows you some of the freshest and most provocative ideas on the minds of the Aspen family. And, of course, the people in the Aspen family bring those ideas to life. Nowhere do people and ideas connect in quite the exhilarating way they do at the Institute. For evidence, look no further than our overview of the Socrates Program (page 50), this year celebrating its 20th anniversary. Friendships, partnerships, collaborations, businesses, foundations—they all get started at Aspen gatherings, as Socrates shows. As pretty much every story in our Around the Institute section (page 13) shows. It’s you, though, who keeps the Institute inspired. Give us your own ideas, please, at ideas.magazine@aspeninstitute.org— and welcome to the first issue of our new IDEAS: The Magazine of the Aspen Institute.

WALTER ISAACSON President and Chief Executive Officer ELLIOT F. GERSON Executive Vice President, Policy and Public Programs; International Partners NAMITA KHASAT Executive Vice President, Finance and Administrative Services; Chief Financial Officer; Corporate Treasurer ERIC L. MOTLEY, PHD Executive Vice President, Institutional Advancement;Corporate Secretary PETER REILING Executive Vice President, Leadership and Seminar Programs; Executive Director, Henry Crown Fellowship Program RAJIV VINNAKOTA Executive Vice President, Youth & Engagement Programs CINDY BUNISKI Vice President, Administration; Executive Director, Aspen Wye Campus JAMES M. SPIEGELMAN Vice President, Chief External Affairs Officer; Deputy to the President EDITOR-IN-CHIEF AND PUBLISHER Corby Kummer EXECUTIVE EDITOR Sacha Zimmerman MANAGING EDITOR Alison Decker ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER Douglas Farrar SENIOR EDITORS Jean Morra, Tarek Rizk ASSISTANT EDITORS Arica VanBoxtel, Keosha Varela DESIGN DIRECTOR Katie Kissane-Viola CREATIVE DIRECTOR Paul Viola EDITOR EMERITUS Jamie Miller MANAGING DIRECTOR, COMMUNICATIONS AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS Pherabe Kolb CONTACT EDITORIAL ideas.magazine@aspeninstitute.org ADVERTISING Cynthia Cameron, 970.544.3453, adsales@aspeninstitute.org GENERAL The Aspen Institute, One Dupont Circle NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20036 202.736.5800, www.aspeninstitute.org

– Corby Kummer

BOARD OF TRUSTEES CHAIRMAN: James S. Crown BOARD OF TRUSTEES Madeleine K. Albright, Paul F. Anderson, Mercedes T. Bass, Miguel Bezos, Richard S. Braddock, Beth A. Brooke-Marciniak, William D. Budinger, William Bynum, Stephen L. Carter, Troy Carter, Cesar Conde, Katie Couric, Andrea Cunningham, Kenneth L. Davis, John Doerr, Thelma Duggin, Arne Duncan, Michael D. Eisner, L. Brooks Entwistle, Alan Fletcher, Corinne Flick, Henrietta H. Fore, Ann B. Friedman, Juan Ramón de la Fuente, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Mircea Geoana, David Gergen, Antonio Gracias, Patrick W. Gross, Arjun Gupta, Jane Harman, Hayne Hipp, Mark Hoplamazian, Gerald D. Hosier, Robert J. Hurst, Walter Isaacson, Natalie Jaresko, Salman Khan, Teisuke Kitayama, Michael Klein, David H. Koch, Satinder K. Lambah, Laura Lauder, Yo-Yo Ma, Frederic V. Malek, James M. Manyika, William E. Mayer*, Bonnie P. McCloskey, David McCormick, Anne Welsh McNulty, Diane Morris, Karlheinz Muhr, Clare Muñana, Jerry Murdock, Marc Nathanson, William A. Nitze, Her Majesty Queen Noor, Jacqueline Novogratz, Olara A. Otunnu, Elaine Pagels, Carrie Walton Penner, Margot L. Pritzker, Peter A. Reiling, Lynda Resnick, Condoleezza Rice, James Rogers, Ricardo Salinas, Anna Deavere Smith, Michelle Smith, Javier Solana, Robert K. Steel*, Shashi Tharoor**, Laurie M. Tisch, Giulio Tremonti, Roderick K. von Lipsey, Vin Weber, Michael Zantovsky *Chairman Emeritus **On Leave of Absence

Roman Cho

LIFETIME TRUSTEES CO-CHAIRMEN: Berl Bernhard, Ann Korologos* LIFETIME TRUSTEES Keith Berwick, John Brademas, James C. Calaway, William T. Coleman, Jr., Lester Crown, Tarun Das, William H. Donaldson, Sylvia A Earle, James L. Ferguson, Richard N. Gardner, Alma L. Gildenhorn, Jacqueline Grapin, Irvine O. Hockaday Jr., Nina Rodale Houghton, Anne Frasher Hudson, Jérôme Huret, William N. Joy, Henry A. Kissinger, Leonard A. Lauder*, Robert H. Malott, Olivier Mellerio, Eleanor Merrill, Elinor Bunin Munroe, Sandra Day O’Connor, Hisashi Owada, Thomas R. Pickering, Charles Powell, Jay Sandrich, Lloyd G. Schermer, Carlo Scognamiglio, Albert H. Small, Andrew L. Stern, Paul A. Volcker, Leslie H. Wexner, Frederick B. Whittemore, Alice Young *Chairman Emeritus

The Aspen Institute sets high standards to ensure forestry is practiced in an environmentally responsible, socially beneficial, and economically viable manner. This issue was printed by American Web on recycled fibers containing 10% postconsumer waste, with inks containing a blend of soy base. Our printer is a certified member of the Forestry Stewardship Council, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, and additionally meets or exceeds all federal Resource Conservation Recovery Act standards

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SUMMER 2016

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AROUND THE INSTITUTE A City That Thinks for Itself Cities that blend urban planning, economic development, and innovation are becoming truly smart, networked enclaves. The experts and entrepreneurs on the Communications and Society Program’s Roundtable on Information Technology examined how digital networks are changing urban life and governance. Their March report, The City as a Platform, studied urban areas around the world. But even looking just at Los Angeles provides a window into how cities think. aspeninstitute.org/city-as-platform

7,000 bodycams

worn by Los Angeles police officers—that’s about 20 percent of the total number of bodycams in the world. Also: 86 percent of complaints against police are dropped based on video evidence.

25,000 parking meters connected to the Internet in LA

7.8+ million visitors

to Los Angeles’s city-government websites per month.

30 percent

of LA drivers use Waze, a navigation app that lets drivers share real-time traffic updates, accidents, police traps, etc. LA sends Waze data on its city projects, and Waze gives LA traffic data every 2 minutes.

The number of different incorporated cities in Los Angeles County IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

AROUND THE INSTITUTE

“You don’t just grow the downtown and hope everybody’s going to benefit, because we know that they won’t,” said Marjorie Kelly, an executive vice president at the Democracy Collaborative. Kelly spoke at an Institute event in January hosted by the Economic Opportunities Program’s Working in America series about creating meaningful economic development. Moderator Dorian Warren, MSNBC contributor and a Roosevelt Institute fellow, moderated a panel to discuss development approaches that are driven by values—equity, transparency, sustainability, and community engagement—and that cultivate high-quality jobs. Richmond, Virginia, Mayor Dwight Jones said that cities must “make sure that the economic development accrues the benefit, not only [to] the city but particularly to the poor community.” Sociologist Sanjay Pinto and the Wellspring Cooperative Corporation’s Emily Kawano offered strategic recommendations like alternative businessownership models, leveraging the purchasing power of large public and nonprofit institutions, and robust workforcedevelopment plans. “We really can build something better from what we have,” Kawano said. Watch the video at as.pn/econdev. And for more, go to as.pn/workinginamerica.

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Walker

DARREN WALKER RECEIVES 2015 PRESTON ROBERT TISCH AWARD IN CIVIC LEADERSHIP “It is the job of a leader to shape a vision people are motivated by.” Ford Foundation President Darren Walker spoke of the challenges of leadership—both personally and as the head of a major philanthropic institution—at a program honoring him with the 2015 Preston Robert Tisch Award in Civic Leadership. The December program at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art featured a conversation between Walker and Institute CEO Walter Isaacson. Walker discussed his decision to focus the Ford Foundation’s work on inequality, which he said has led to an unraveling of American society. He spoke about the need to look at what produces inequality, including cultural narratives that perpetuate stereotypes about poverty and race. Walker called upon foundations and individual donors to “move from a paradigm of generosity to one of justice.” Justice, he explained, requires not just writing a check but looking at why the need exists. He also challenged philanthropists to ask: What can be done to build a world where philanthropy is no longer as necessary? The Preston Robert Tisch Award in Civic Leadership, created in 2009, honors the legacy of the late Bob Tisch, a leader in business, public service, and philanthropy, and is underwritten by his family—Steve, Laurie, and Jonathan and Lizzie Tisch, as well as by the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund.

Erin Baiano

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Intel and the Intel and McAfee logos are trademarks of Intel Corporation or McAfee, Inc. in the US and/or other countries. Copyright ÂŠ 2016 Intel Corporation. IDEAS

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Foundation leaders at the Roy Lichtenstein Studio in New York City

THE ART OF STEWARDING ART Foundations associated with artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Helen Frankenthaler increase arts funding and give the public access to unrivaled cultural resources. But unlike most private foundations, artist-endowed foundations are given non-liquid assets—art collections—that must be used for educational purposes as well as translated through sales into financial resources, whether to support charities, education programs, or grants. Yet the people tapped to head these organizations mainly come from the art-museum world. They are deeply knowledgeable about art history but often face a steep learning curve when it comes to operating under extensive private-foundation regulations, as well as creating grant programs and operating study centers or artists’ residencies. Since 2010, new foundation leaders have been navigating this territory with the Institute’s Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative—the first and only source of information on forming and governing these uniquely endowed charities. The individuals using AEFI’s resources wanted a more integrated educational experience. So this spring AEFI launched the Seminar on Strategy for New Artist-Endowed Foundation Leaders, presented with the University of Miami School of Law. The annual New York City seminar will orient new leaders to foundations’ complex business models, their art-historical role, and varied governance requirements. What’s more, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Robert Motherwell’s Dedalus Foundation, and the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum will each host one day of the program, offering participants a firsthand view of their operations. aspeninstitute.org/aefi

IDEAS

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Scott Rudd

AROUND THE INSTITUTE

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

AROUND THE INSTITUTE

FORUM MOVES

#WOMENFORWARD “Women where? Women when? What women? ... Do we really need the category of women?” asked Melissa Harris-Perry, formerly with MSNBC, in the kickoff to the Institute’s first Forum on Women and Girls, in March. In honor of International Women’s Day, the Institute hosted a Alan Alabastro

series of discussions with more than 100 women’s-rights and economic-justice leaders. The forum was a lead-up to the June White House Summit on the United State of Women, Liu

which the Institute organized with the administration. At the forum, speakers were frank: “We as a society do

WHAT MAKES AN AMERICAN?

not want to be uncomfortable,” said Teresa Younger of the Ms. Foundation for Women. “That is why patriarchy survives

In an essay for Democracy Journal, Eric Liu, the executive director of the Institute’s Citizenship and American Identity Program, argued that a diversifying United States needs a shared base of historical, cultural, and political knowledge. Inspired by E.D. Hirsch’s 1987 book Cultural Literacy, Liu argued that a 21st-century sense of cultural literacy must be radically inclusive—reflecting the true breadth of American diversity. The article sparked the What Every American Should Know project, an initiative to build civic and cultural literacy in America. Liu and his team at the Institute are crowdsourcing Top 10 lists of what all Americans should know in order to be engaged and literate citizens. Submissions have come in from across the country and across the political spectrum. At the top of the aggregated list so far are:

today.” Speakers were also pragmatic: Tina Tchen, chief of staff to the first lady, noted, “Once you put a gender lens on how you’re doing policy, a whole new set of things come up.” The message was forward-looking: “What’s really galvanizing young people is the possibility that we can see freedom in our lifetime,” said Alicia Garza, founder of #BlackLivesMatter. Too often, conversations about women’s issues are separated into two camps—those that affect American women and those that affect women in every other country on the planet. But as Kavita Ramdas of the Ford Foundation said, “If we think these distinctions—‘First World,’ ‘Second World,’ and ‘Third World’—exist, we are kidding ourselves.”

1. US Constitution

The forum was organized by two Institute programs:

2. Declaration of Independence

Ascend and Aspen Global Health and Development.

3. Martin Luther King Jr.

www.theunitedstateofwomen.org

4. US Civil War 5. Trail of Tears 6. Manifest Destiny 7. “I Have a Dream” 8. Slavery 9. White Privilege

Steve Johnson

10. Gettysburg Address

Harris-Perry, Garza, and Younger

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The project has launched a campaign to have educators, librarians, historians, artists, scientists, and everyone across the country submit their own Top 10 lists. And the team is now expanding the conversation through spin-off projects such as segments on the Aspen Idea podcast featuring guests like E.D. Hirsch, author of the seminal Cultural Literacy; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of New America. The American Federation of Teachers’ Randi Weingarten kicked off a related blog on The Huffington Post. And Liu and his team are hosting a series of public events on What Every American Should Know. Submit your own Top 10 list to WhatEveryAmericanShouldKnow.org.

“Building a Culture of Health in America… is much like assembling a quilt. It requires many hands working together. And often, the most unlikely pairings create the most evocative designs.”

Now, more than ever, the movement to improve health must be championed not solely by the health sector, but also by those who have not historically seen themselves as part of the health arena. With that in mind, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is issuing a challenge to individuals and organizations across America to forge new and unconventional partnerships with the goal of building a Culture of Health that benefits all.

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, MD, MBA, President and Chief Executive Officer

Think big. Act together. Learn more at rwjf.org/2016AnnualMessage.

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AROUND THE INSTITUTE

ON THE GROUND AND IN THE WORLD The “Aspen Idea” is not just something the Institute exports; it’s something nurtured in its own employees, too. The Aspen on the Ground service initiative was the brainchild of Institute employees Erin Bailey, formerly of the Native American Youth Program, and Katie Drasser, of Aspen Global Health and Development, who were awarded an Aspen Innovation Fund grant to design the program. The initiative’s goal is to promote the policies that employees work on every day in the office with service projects out in the world. The inaugural Aspen on the Ground winners are Travis Green, Janice Joseph, and Gina Rogari. Green, a program manager at the Community Strategies Group, will work with Communities Unlimited to start a local food system using WealthWorks, an economic-development program the Institute helped refine. Green’s project will connect low-income Delta producers to Memphis’s local-food movement. Joseph and Rogari, the program manager and program associate in Global Health and Development, will merge Joseph’s Haitian Shutterstock

ancestry and Rogari’s work with the Alliance for Artisan Enterprise. They will host business workshops for Haitian artisans to help them build economically viable businesses for the global market.

Tompkins and Grossman

On April 19, Viking Penguin’s Carole Desanti, the author of The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R., moderated a discussion about the growing popularity of fantasy fiction in an event cosponsored by the Institute and Aspen Words. Lev Grossman, who recently published the last novel in his The Magicians trilogy, talked about the appeal of created worlds for adults and children. His magical world of Fillory, compared by critics to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, was recently brought to life in a SyFy TV series of the same name. Hannah Tinti, who received the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize for her best-selling book, The Good Thief, discussed how strange and otherworldly events can redefine the borders of truth and storytelling. And Mark Tompkins joined the conversation; his debut novel, The Last Days of Magic, combines Celtic and Biblical mythology with medieval political intrigue. aspenwords.org

Erin Baiano

THE ART OF WORLD BUILDING

THE 2GEN WAR ON POVERTY In January, the Ascend Program commemorated five years at the Institute with an event assessing states’ efforts to break the cycle of poverty for families. National experts shared advances in two-generation, family-focused policies from the last half-decade. The State of 2Gen Roundtable included leaders from the White House, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. “We are hungry to use every ounce of the resources on this planet,” said the White House Domestic Policy Council’s $2 billion in emergency aid to impoverished families, and Ascend is eager to help the administration focus those resources on the whole family. ascend.aspeninstitute.org

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Carla Thompson, Anne Mosle

Steve Johnson

Luke Tate on battling generational poverty. President Obama has committed to

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IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

Dan Bayer

AROUND THE INSTITUTE

HOW TO MAKE A BETTER WORLD BY 2030 For the past three years, hundreds of highly successful entrepreneurial leaders have come together for the Aspen Action Forum to discuss how to make a positive societal impact on health, education, business, and more. Lynda and Stewart Resnick, co-owners of The Wonderful Company, recently announced a $15 million endowment—the largest gift in the Institute’s history—to ensure the program’s continued operation through 2030. Renamed the Resnick Aspen Action Forum, the annual event is held over four days in Aspen, where attendees (most of whom are Fellows in the Aspen Global Leadership Network) make public “Action Pledges” that detail specific ways in which they will create positive change in their communities. Past pledges include:

I Will:

Educate and empower teen mothers in the red light district of Panama City

I Will:

Curb child-marriage practices in northern Nigerian communities

I Will:

Educate 100,000 girls in India

I Will:

Build a sustainable manufacturing facility in the Midwestern United States

In 2015, Lynda Resnick herself made a pledge: to reduce obesity, disease, and stress in California’s Central Valley, where most of The Wonderful Company’s workforce lives. “This event is one of the few in the world that moves real change-makers from thought to action,” said Lynda Resnick, who is also a Trustee of the Institute. “The outcomes of the Resnick Aspen Action Forum are tangible, and Stewart

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and I are excited to support it in this way.” The Resnicks have provided major support for the forum since 2013, and in that time, over 1,000 participants from more than 40 countries have attended. With this endowment, AGLN hopes to deepen the impact Action Pledges are making. This year’s forum, themed “Leading Toward Justice,” is July 19 to 22. Participants will be challenged to envision a better world by 2030. Combined with seminars, workshops, and topical dialogues designed to support pledges and spur new connections, the Action Forum will create bridges across countries, cultures, and industries to bring new resources and solutions to the world’s most complex problems. resnickaspenactionforum.org

A Special Note from Walter Isaacson I am pleased to announce that Lynda and Stewart Resnick, co-founders of The Wonderful Company, have pledged $15 million to the Institute to create a term endowment that will ensure the continuation of the Aspen Action Forum, now the Resnick Aspen Action Forum, through 2030. Over the past three years, Lynda and Stewart’s extraordinary support has enabled hundreds of Fellows from across the Aspen Global Leadership Network—as well as a variety of other leaders, including an annual cohort from California’s Central Valley— to connect with each other at the Action Forum, deepen their commitment to values-based leadership, and add depth and staying power to their social-impact ventures. The Action Forum is among the Institute’s greatest platforms for effecting real and measurable change in the world, and it is also our most geographically and demographically diverse annual convening. Lynda and Stewart’s personal commitment to diversity, leadership, and fellowship make them natural partners to help carry the Action Forum into the future, and we thank them for their continued support.

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2016

AROUND THE INSTITUTE

“EVERYONE HAS TO WIN” “Foreign policy is not about power or interests alone but about relationships,” Jeremi Suri said at a Hurst Lecture Series discussion in Aspen. “Some will win more than others, but everyone has to win.” This March, the series brought Suri, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, and Robert Hutchings, a professor at Princeton University and the former chair of the National Intelligence Council, to Aspen to discuss their new book, Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy. The book examines diplomacy through ten case studies, ranging from the Camp David Accords to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Hutchings discussed the remarkable use of diplomacy to end the Cold War, and Suri talked about how Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong opened China to the United States. The Hurst Community Fund established the series to bring renowned leaders to the Institute for public events. aspeninstitute.org/events/hurst

RACE: ON CAMPUS AND IN THE CITY The annual Symposium on the State of Race in America, a partnership between the Institute’s Communications and Society Program and the Comcast Corporation, explores what it means to be a person of color in 21st-century America. This year, the March symposium featured panels on higher education and on urban demographics. Moderated by Fox News’ Juan Williams, the first panel featured student activists, advocacy organizations, and university presidents on topics like prioritizing diversity and inclusionary policies on campus. “Diversity is one thing,” said Eduardo Padrón, the president of Miami-Dade College. “Inclusion is another.” In the second panel, journalist Ray Suarez moderated a debate between government officials and housing advocates on the pros and cons of gentrification. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake explained: “I want Baltimore to be a welcoming city. But I don’t want to lose our character.” All participants then attended a town hall for a passionate, informal conversation on race and the 2016 election. as.pn/stateofrace

Healey

As technologies become more sophisticated, so have the potential threats to cybersecurity. The coordinated hacker attacks on companies such as Sony Pictures and on nations like last December’s Ukraine power shutdown have underscored the vulnerability of an online world. In March, The New York Times’ David E. Sanger moderated a conversation on cyber threats with Jason Healey, a cyber specialist at Columbia University, and Andy Ozment, from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cybersecurity and Communications. The event was part of the Aspen at Roosevelt House series, a partnership between the Institute and Hunter College. Ozment stressed the primary importance of vigilance in protecting personal data. Still, both he and Healey were optimistic about using the Cloud for cyber defense. “Our strategy now is centralizing things in one place where we can protect them,” Ozment said. Created by the Institute’s Homeland Security Program, the conversation was a preview of the 2016 Aspen Security Forum, where experts will debate the national security issues of the day. aspensecurityforum.org

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SUMMER 2016

Matt Capowski

When Hackers Attack

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IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

AROUND THE INSTITUTE

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CARRIE MAE WEEMS THURSDAY, JULY 28

STATE OF EDUCATION States collectively invest nearly $600 billion per year in education, making it one of the largest line items in their budgets—on par with federal investments in military and national defense. And yet legislators often don’t have the time or capacity to develop education-policy expertise. That’s why last fall the Education and Society Program part-

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THURSDAY, AUGUST 4

ALEX PRAGER

THURSDAY, AUGUST 11

state legislators for the 2015 Education Summit in Aspen. Over two days, veteran legplore their role in education and to deepen their knowledge of critical public-education issues. Two classroom teachers kicked off the summit with compelling reflections on the purpose of public education in an interview with Institute CEO Walter Isaacson. Kansas Speaker of the House Peggy Mast called the summit “a rich learning experience that has empowered me to confidently become more involved in the education challenges we face.” In December, the Education and Society Program published findings from focus groups with state legislators, Engaging State Legislators: Lessons for the

Education Sector. aspendrl.org.

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IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

ASPEN WORDS GIVES EMERGING WRITERS A BOOST Despite the digital changes transforming the publishing world and the challenges facing aspiring authors, writers keep writing. And Aspen Words fosters new literary voices through its Emerging Writer Fellowship. The fourth class was announced in February, following a competitive process in which candidates were selected based on the quality and promise of a writing sample. The seven winners will receive a full scholarship to Summer Words—Aspen Words’s annual writing conference and literary festival for workshops, consultations with agents and editors, panel discussions, readings, and receptions. Former Fellows have gone on to win prestigious literary awards and have received major book deals. This year’s 2016 Emerging Writer Fellows are: Stephen Narain, Amanda Rusher Foushee, A.L. Major, Esther Amini, Sarah Eisner, Jessica Lynn Suchon, and A.K. Small. aspenwords.org

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

AROUND THE INSTITUTE

NATIVE SPEAKERS

VITAL ORGAN

Before 1978, Native American children were ripped from their families and cultures and placed in non-Native homes at alarmingly high rates. The practice was so distressing that Congress ultimately passed the Indian Child Welfare Act—with strong bipartisan support—to ensure that Native children would remain with their tribes. Since then, when placing Native children in foster care or in private adoptions, courts must first look to extended family or other tribal members before considering non-Native placement. Although Native children interact with the foster-care system at higher rates than their non-Native peers, ICWA has played a vital role in ensuring that children remain connected to their tribes, culture, and language, which experts have found supports healthy development. Recently, however, the law has come under attack by groups seeking to undermine the law based on spurious claims about its intent. The Center for Native American Youth hosted a roundtable meeting at the Institute’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. last December on the law and general Native American child-welfare issues. The discussion brought together White House staff, leading child-welfare advocates, and tribal leaders to address anti-ICWA concerns and to understand why Native children need additional support and cultural connections. Two Native foster youth attended to provide their perspectives and to share why staying within their tribal culture has helped them succeed despite the early challenges they faced. cnay.org

Cameron Carpenter, the Institute’s Harman-Eisner Artist in Residence, opened his US tour in January at SFJAZZ, and Arts Program Director Damian Woetzel joined the organ superstar for a pre-concert conversation. While in San Francisco, Carpenter also launched his educational initiative—an organ workshop for children that he hopes to stage prior to as many of his concerts as possible. Carpenter’s instrument of choice is a revolutionary digital organ and speaker system he helped design, called the International Touring Organ. That the ITO actually tours is itself revolutionary: pipe organs are not known for their mobility. Carpenter calls it “a profound queering of the question of what an organ really is.” As the Touring Organ moves from city to city, Carpenter thinks it is vital to “make a serious effort every time it’s staged to open it up to children.” The Arts Program also added a new element to the artist’s residency: mentorship. Carpenter has taken under his wing a New Jersey musician named Matthew Whitaker, who is 14, blind, and a largely self-taught organ and piano prodigy.

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SUMMER 2016

Carpenter and Whitaker

Scott Cherniss

Elijah Arquette

Steve Johnson

Courtesy of

The young talent joined Carpenter onstage. aspeninstitute.org/arts-program

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SUMMER 2016

ASPEN LIBRIS Power Words From the incongruous personality of Richard Nixon to the future of work to an intimate portrait of grief, this season’s 2015/2016 slate of authors for the Institute’s Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series represented some of the most anticipated books in recent years. Biographers, historians, philosophers, political scientists, and journalists came to the Institute’s Washington, DC, headquarters to tackle the presidency, global politics, public education, industry, women, and death. Below is just a sample. To watch videos of the events, go to aspeninstitute.org/video.

EVAN THOMAS Journalist and New York Times best-selling author

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON Sociology professor, Georgetown University

Being Nixon: A Man Divided

The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America

“

Even Nixon didn’t know what it was like to be Nixon.

“

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Black people deserve a president who cares about us in public spaces.

ALEC ROSS Distinguished visiting fellow, Johns Hopkins University

DALE RUSSAKOFF Contributor, The New Yorker The Prize: Who’s in charge of America’s Schools?

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The Industries of the Future

If you’re not talking to teachers, you’re really missing an opportunity for change.

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JON MEACHAM executive editor, Random House Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

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He … fully understood that compromise was not a dirty word but was the oxygen of democracy.

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Humans are much more difficult to upgrade than software.

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MELANNE VERVEER Executive director, Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace, and Security Fast Forward: How Women can Achieve Power and Purpose

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Increasingly today, women are using their power for purpose.

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GARRY KASPAROV Chess grandmaster and political activist

The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities

Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must be Stopped

The Constitution does not write the president a blank check—even in war time.

”

DENNIS ROSS Distinguished fellow, Washington Institute for Near East Policy Doomed to Succeed: The US-Israel Relationship from Truman to Obama

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Some of what Israel does is to motivate the rest of the world.

IDEAS

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STEPHEN BREYER Associate justice, US Supreme Court

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SUMMER 2016

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I’m always on the side of anti-Putinism— whether that’s in Russia or this country.

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DIANE REHM Host, The Diane Rehm Show On My Own

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I rage at a system that would not allow John to be helped toward his own death.

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LEADING VOICES

Yassine El Mansouri

ADVANCE MEN

Rubenstein

The head of the Instituteâ€™s newly renamed Department of Institutional Advancement, Eric Motley, talks to one of Americaâ€™s leading philanthropists, David Rubenstein, about the contemporary world of giving, forming smart and spirited partnerships, making sure projects are meaningful and impactful, and why advancing the Institute toward an ambitious future means constantly turning creative ideas into action. By Eric Motley

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have recently been honored with the responsibility to advance the the purchase of the last privately owned copy of the Magna Carta for Institute’s mission as Executive Vice President of Development. the National Archives, the restoration of the Washington Monument, To be truthful, I did not expect my journey here to lead me and the historical reconstruction of the slave community at Thomas to development. I came to the Institute in 2007 from the State Jefferson’s Monticello. He stands at the helm of numerous academic Department, where I had been helping to run the Fulbright and cultural boards, including the Kennedy Center, Duke University, Program. My history with Aspen, though, goes back to 2003, when Lincoln Center, the University of Chicago, and the Smithsonian. I was invited to be part of the Henry Crown Fellowship Program David sets an example for the entire charitable community during my time at the White House. In the years after that first deeply through his participation in the Giving Pledge, a commitment to give meaningful engagement, I had the pleasure and good fortune to away at least half of his wealth within his lifetime. So in thinking about experience firsthand every single department within this organization. the future of the Institute, my role in it, and the way that I hope the I went on to oversee the Henry Crown Fellowship Program, in our larger Aspen community will consider participating in our programs, Leadership department. I ran a I asked David to share some of his commission to reform the White vast wisdom. Here are excerpts House appointments process, within our wide-ranging conversation, The interdisciplinary training from Policy Programs. And for the past two which took place on a chilly weekend years, I have overseen a pair of event in “Aspen-ism” I had, in fact, morning in Washington as winter was series that straddle Public Programs drawing to an end. and Development. probably constitutes the best Motley: Could you share a bit about My 13-year history with the the underlying motivation behind possible preparation for my Institute has given me a profound your philanthropy? education in the art of moving thought current duties, which turn on into action. In my policy work, that Rubenstein: I came from very action was legislative. With Henry having an instinct for who we modest circumstances and feel that Crown, our Fellows become agents I’ve been fortunate in my business for action through social enterprise are, what we do very broadly career. I now am in a position to and advocacy. I see this as a unifying give back to my community, my and very specifically, and pattern throughout the work of my society, and my country, and I have colleagues and friends here at the the type of people who make an obligation to do so. I don’t need Institute: our mission to move thought to buy more houses and other kinds into action. Though I had received good partners in our quest for of ornaments of wealth, and I have several offers to oversee external more than enough for my personal social good. relations for other nonprofits, I always and my family’s well-being, and I doubted whether my fundamentally don’t really see a need to leave an scholastic inclinations and talents enormous sum to one’s children. So would be well suited to the activities of development, which I took to if you have more money than your family needs, what else can you do be transactional at their core. with it but give it away? And I feel that giving it away while I am alive But I now realize that my thinking was mistaken and that my new is better than having an executor give it away, so I have begun a fairly role is at the very heart of this endeavor. What we do in “Development,” extensive program to give away the bulk of my wealth. which I will shortly be renaming “Institutional Advancement,” is work with diverse partners across fields to bring great ideas to life through Motley: What draws you to specific institutions and what are the singular resources of the Institute. It is really about building you looking for out of the partnerships that you have, say, with the successful partnerships and is perhaps more analogous to the work of University of Chicago or the Kennedy Center, and how do you an investment manager—with that profession’s emphasis on research, describe which causes and organizations you will support? value, and return—than the old-school model of fundraising. The interdisciplinary training in “Aspen-ism” I had, in fact, Rubenstein: I began by starting with organizations that had probably constitutes the best possible preparation for my current been helpful to me in my life or career: so the university that I duties, which turn on having an instinct for who we are, what we do went to, Duke, or law school I went to, University of Chicago. very broadly and very specifically, and the type of people who make But I also am very indebted to institutions in the city where I good partners in our quest for social good. And I have not found a live, Washington. So institutions like the Kennedy Center, the better partner or guide for thinking about my new field than David Smithsonian, and the National Archives are organizations I’ve Rubenstein, founder of the Carlyle Group and one of the great gotten some benefit out of over the years. So I tended to pick philanthropists of our era. David has led such signature investments as things that were meaningful to my life, to the place that I live, or IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

Motley, Rubenstein

helpful to my family. But then, my interests tend to be relatively eclectic, and I acquired more institutions that I was interested in when I learned more about them. I probably have too many to support as meaningfully as I would like, but I am probably supporting about 70 organizations annually in a meaningful way. I chair about six national capital campaigns, and I serve on about 30 nonprofit boards—way too many for any sane person to do. I am more actively involved in the ones that I chair, obviously, and so I chair a number of organizations. I get a lot of pleasure out of being involved in the nonprofit world, and I try to balance my for-profit activities with my not-for-profit activities in a way that I enjoy. I just wish I had more time in the day. Motley: You give generously to the Institute. What is it about what we do that engages you, and what has been most fulfilling about your relationship with us? Rubenstein: Even among the 70 nonprofits I support, Aspen is a unique organization, in the way that it brings people together from all over the country and indeed all over the world to have very interesting conversations, dialogues, and networking. And I find the Aspen Ideas Festival and Resnick Aspen Action Forum to be unique assemblages of very talented people. You can learn a great deal by meeting with people and listening to them. The Aspen leadership has done a spectacular job of bringing out the best in people from throughout the country and around the world. Motley: I doubt that all of your experiences with nonprofits have been great. Are there qualities that you find lacking in your institutional partnerships?

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SUMMER 2016

Rubenstein: When you get involved with any organization, you

ultimately, if you are in my position, will probably be asked to give or want to give money. And some organizations are better at figuring out what to do with the money productively than others. The best ones keep you informed of what is happening with the money you’ve given and keep you engaged in the institution. Some are better at that than others. I don’t have any unpleasant experiences, but there are some organizations where I’ve probably shied away from giving more money or spending more time because the experience was not as intellectually interesting as I would have wanted, or the receptivity to my ideas was not anywhere close to what I had hoped it would be. But that’s a very, very modest number, and generally the organizations I pick are ones I am very happy with today. Motley: How do you measure success and impact when you think

about the gifts you give? Rubenstein: I am not wealthy enough to say that I can tackle the

problems of health in Africa or K-to-12 education in the United States. Bill Gates has a great deal more wealth, and I admire his efforts to try to tackle those problems. I am trying to do three things: One, find a project I can start that wouldn’t have gotten started had I not gotten involved. Two, I can complete something that wouldn’t have been completed had I not gotten involved. And three, that I’m likely to see during my lifespan the reasonable success of this project. So if, for example, I were to say that I want to tackle K-through-12 education in the United States, I’m not sure at my age—66—I would live long enough to really see the success of that. So I will say to Monticello, Why don’t you take some resources that

Steve Johnson

LEADING VOICES

Steve Johnson

Rubenstein

I will be happy to give you and try to rehabilitate Monticello, and I’m likely to live long enough to see that happen. Or scholarships to undergraduates. I’m likely to see these young adults receiving the benefits of that scholarship. But there is an enormous amount that you can give your money to profitably and productively, and I have to pick and choose. Generally, I’m looking for things where I can make a difference, I can see the impact of it while I’m alive. Motley: How is today’s philanthropic challenge different from that of previous generations? For example, you have made incredible contributions to the cultural infrastructure of our nation’s capital, often in the absence of federal action. In the current political climate, how can public and private entities work together on preserving national treasures? Rubenstein: The federal government does not have the resources

that it once had and will not be able to provide funds for cultural institutions among other things it used to be able to do. Therefore, private citizens should step up and try to engage in public-private partnerships with the government. I’ve, for example, made some gifts where the National Park Service will probably put up some money alongside the money that I might put up. In the Washington Monument project, the government matched what I put up. In a project that was recently announced, I will be putting up the bulk of the money to help rehabilitate the Lincoln Memorial, but the government is putting up some money. It’s designed to say to citizens, If there is a project that would be enhanced by your involvement, the government might be willing to put up some money so you can get something done that would not otherwise have been done.

I look for, one, a project I can start that would not otherwise have gotten started. Two, something that wouldn’t have been completed had I not gotten involved. And three, something where I can make a difference-where I can see the impact while I’m alive. We’re all on Earth for a relatively short period of time, and we have an obligation to society to give our financial resources, our time, our energy, and our ideas, depending on ourability to give. Everybody will feel a much richer human experience if they do. Motley: What advice would you offer to philanthropists who are just starting out or rethinking their approach to charitable investments? Rubenstein: You have to find an institution you’re interested in.

You have to find something where you have some passion, where you want to stay involved. And you should start small and then grow, and try to have some impact on the institution or particular project you’re involved with. We’re all on Earth for a relatively short period of time, and we have an obligation to society and humanity to try to give back to society with our financial resources, our time, our energy, our ideas, depending on what you have the ability to give. Everybody will feel a much richer human experience if they do that. I feel much better about what I’m doing with my time on this Earth when I am giving away money than when I am making money. I hope that I just live long enough to give away the bulk of my money and see the impact of it. Motley: What advice can you give me as I begin this new role, after being at Aspen for 13 years in other roles? Rubenstein: I have no doubt you’ll succeed in this. My experience

is that people who succeed in one project rarely fail in another. And what you’ve done before at Aspen has been very successful. I would try to talk to as many potential donors as you can and try to find out what interests them and try to help them craft something that will make them interested in getting involved and providing support. But also make certain donors understand it’s not only financial support but also their time, their energy, their ideas that will be useful. IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

IMPACT: ASPEN ARTS PROGRAM

Aubree Dallas

Boens

BEYOND THE SINGLE STORY

Each summer, the Institute’s Arts Program gathers young creative leaders for a special session of the Aspen Seminar, “Leadership, Arts, and the Good Society.” Three of them share the discovery of coming together in Aspen—and what they brought back to their student lives.

he summer seminar is a culmination of the Creative Young Leaders Alliance, which begins with local seminars organized by the Arts Program throughout the year. Participants from local seminars are then selected to come to Aspen, where they also have the opportunity to take workshops with Arts Track speakers at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Last year, participants worked with Elizabeth Alexander, Barack Obama’s inaugural poet and the director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation, and Claudia Rankine, whose most recent book, Citizen: An American Lyric, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for the National Book Award.

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College-bound alumni of the program are eligible to serve as Civic Practice Scholars, the formal representatives of the Arts Program for one year both online and in person. They share their art and continued thinking on their roles as artists in society through a monthly blog and regular social-media presence. And they engage as mentors for new students taking part in the seminar. The first scholars for 2015–2016, Madeleine LeCesne and Karlyn Boens, come respectively from the National Student Poets and Young Chicago Authors. They are joined here by Louis Lafair, who participated in the first seminar in 2014.

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IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

IMPACT: ASPEN ARTS PROGRAM

Aubree Dallas

Lafair

LeCesne

Louis Lafair Landing at the Aspen airport took my breath away. It was an incredible view—and a terrifying descent. The plane, buffeted by wind, slipped between mountains. The participants in my seminar were coming together from different parts of the country, different socioeconomic backgrounds, different perspectives. Some of us were Young Chicago Authors; some medalists in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards; and some—myself included—were National Student Poets. We shared one thing: a love of poetry. From the moment we all met in Aspen, we didn’t stop talking—and none of the talk was small. Over the following days, discussing the writing of Plato and Aristotle, Hannah Arendt and Martin Luther King—and more—we explored the role artists play in society. The conversation often became intense, with conflicting opinions and existential debates. Navigating it sometimes felt like landing at the Aspen airport. Time and again, we returned to Chimamanda Adichie’s ideas on the danger of a single story. As a child in Nigeria, Adichie had a house servant, Fide, whose poverty became her single story of him. When she attended college in the United States, she herself became a similar victim: her roommate was shocked that Adichie spoke English, asked to hear some of her “tribal music” (the best Adichie could do was a Mariah Carey tape), and assumed that Adichie couldn’t use a stove. When we reduce someone to a single story, Adichie says, there’s “no possibility of a connection as human equals.” But “when we reject the single story, … when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”

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It was easy enough in Aspen, our own little paradise, to reject the single story, to dive deep beyond the surface, and to see each other as more than just the places where we’re from. But how would we translate this idea into the real world? Three months later, I was landing at a different airport, this time in California, to begin freshman year of college. I encountered hundreds of other students. But I became frustrated by how few of them I could truly meet. I knew an individual just by his or her name, dorm, hometown—maybe a small, defining anecdote. Here was the girl from Montana, the guy in the military, the kid who can solve Rubik’s Cubes blindfolded. Eventually, I started getting to know people better. I became friends with Rachel, Pablo, and Noah. That they’re from Montana, in the military, and capable of solving Rubik’s Cubes blindfolded are now just minor facts in the complex stories of who they are. Since the seminar, my hunger for people’s stories is insatiable. I seek them wherever I can. For example, John, who swipes my card every day at Arrillaga Dining Hall, is not just “the John who works at Arrillaga.” John Edward Cabrera also works at a McDonald’s and a movie theater, he has been an extra in 23 movies, and he attends clown camp each summer. He is the nephew of one of the Mirabal sisters and the cousin of a congresswoman currently running for president in the Dominican Republic. Unsurprisingly, when we sat down to have a longer conversation than our standard greeting, he said, “I have stories for you.” And so my college—full of so many people with so many wonderful stories—can become, like Aspen, “a kind of paradise.”

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IMPACT: ASPEN ARTS PROGRAM

Karlyn Boens As a freshman at a college that has only a 25 percent minority population, I am not surrounded by a lot of people who look like me. When we talk about race in my classes, I often find that the real conversation we’re having is about being black. And generally not the good parts—it’s usually about slavery or oppression. As the only black student in many of my classes, my teachers look to me to offer “insight,” to be the voice of blackness. Even worse, when my teacher or classmates voice any kind of opinion on the subject, they quickly look to me to check my reaction. I feel like an animal at the zoo. But last summer, during a workshop with the award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, I was no longer on display. It started with a simple question. Prompting us to write on racial identity, Claudia asked us, “What is your view on whiteness?” Frankly, I had never thought about it. At first, I could still only respond in terms of blackness. “Over here, black people are experiencing cultural paranoia,” I wrote. “This is a survival mode where black people question the motives of all white people and presume them to be antagonistic to blacks.” Claudia invited us to share our responses. I doubt I was the only poet who felt uneasy. No one was eager to share their thoughts first. I do not remember if I was the very last person to share, but when I did, I offered nothing new to the conversation. Every one of us expressed in one way or another how being white meant everything that being black was not. In Claudia’s book, Citizen, she writes, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a white sharp background.” I don’t feel the same way. I always feel a strong awareness of my skin color no matter what kinds of complexions are in the group of people I am around. But when I am surrounded by people who look like me, it is easier to think about our lack of privileges. To think about how often I am asked to see the “person in charge,” and how high the odds are that the person in charge will not look like me. To think about how my

social class is not advantageous when it comes to seeking legal or medical help. To think about how innocent people who look like me can be killed carrying nothing more dangerous than a drink and a bag of Skittles. I don’t think I realized at the time that Claudia’s question about whiteness was really a conversation about privilege. Never had I heard the word “privilege” used in the context of race relations. I listened to my white peers talk about the privilege of being articulate without people around them being shocked, or what a privilege it is not to ever worry about being followed while in a shopping center. We thought about race from the opposite view of how my classes thought about it—the perspective of whiteness and not blackness. All eyes were not on me, and I was not looked to for validation or insight. Sitting in the workshop, I listened to what each of my white peers had to offer and dared not make them feel on display, as I had felt whenever topics were about blackness. I wanted them to embrace their privilege with no shame attached. I cannot tell you that by the end of my workshop with Claudia Rankine we all held hands and sang wonderful songs of togetherness. But she opened our eyes wider that afternoon. It didn’t give me any answers—in fact, I’m left with more questions. How can privilege build community and not chaos? How can I help create this world? But I do have an idea of how I can participate in change. It starts with more vulnerability and more open and honest conversations. It starts with me telling this story over and over again. It is no longer just a workshop between Claudia and poets. Now, when I am in class and the topic shifts to blackness, I no longer feel on display. I know that in order to grow as a community of students and understand one another’s uniqueness, tough questions have to be asked. I have chosen to be the black student who responds with no shame.

Madeleine LeCesne My first night in Aspen, we had a welcome dinner for everyone participating in the seminar: the poets, the mentors, the Arts Program staff, and Todd Breyfogle, our seminar leader, who was there with his family. Amid each of us taking a turn to say hello and introduce ourselves, Todd’s sixyear-old son, Lucas, got up and introduced himself to the group as Harry Potter. He explained that he was “there” but that we actually couldn’t see him—since he wore a cloak of invisibility. And we played along, calling into the sky, “Where’s Lucas?” as he sat giggling over a plate of pasta. Over three days of discussing art, philosophy, and race during the seminar sessions, one of the many discoveries we made was that in our real lives back home, invisibility wasn’t part of a game that we were playing: it was something many of us had fallen victim to. One poet told us that he felt nervous about moving from his family’s farm in South Carolina to go to college; I shared this fear with him, as I too worried about leaving the South—in my case New Orleans—for school in the Northeast. Someone else told the group that the open approach the seminar provided afforded him his first opportunity to openly and honestly respond to questions about race and gender—since he often felt silenced on such subjects as a young white man from Indiana. Another poet said he couldn’t believe that no one looked at him suspiciously in the grocery store here, an unbelievable occurrence for a young black man from Chicago. We found that our various backgrounds and identities, despite all their differences, had managed to create in us fears so great that we were in danger of becoming invisible, so lost in others’ projections of us that we couldn’t clearly see ourselves. In my case, I came to Aspen

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believing that no matter where life had taken me thus far—to the White House when I became a National Student Poet, to Aspen to take the leadership seminar—my accomplishments were tainted by my own impostor syndrome, that I didn’t deserve any of it, that someone must have missed the real me, and that I had just gotten lucky. Each day, we grew braver together as we talked through the meaning of citizenship, which we defined as active belonging. We created our own community as we accepted each other, one by one, through discourse and writing—always connected through our love of poetry. On the last night, one of our mentors, Dominique Chestand, told us: “Never apologize for breathing. Never apologize for taking up space.” When she said this, I realized so many of my experiences had been tainted by my own impostor syndrome. I readily believed that no matter where life took me, I didn’t deserve to be there—I had just gotten lucky. But I remember, sitting there together that night, how closely we saw each other and how firmly we believed that we belonged. It was the first time I didn’t doubt my presence. I was meant to be in that room with those people. We all were. I still work on this, reminding myself that it’s OK to be seen and to stop apologizing for being present. I’m less convinced that someone’s going to “find me out” and more committed to the idea that I’ve earned my accomplishments. I can’t say that this isn’t difficult to do at Princeton, and most days I still ask myself, “What are you doing here?” But then I go to my poetry workshop every Thursday, and the conversations spiral into the same themes as those discussed in Aspen—often because I try to direct them there—and I begin to feel as if my time there never really ended.

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IMPACT: LEADERSHIP INITIATIVES

GOING CLEAN

Three AGLN Fellows came from Institute seminars ready to clean up their home territories—literally.

or 20 years, since the launch of the Henry Crown Fellowship Program in 1996, the Institute has been developing entrepreneurial leaders from around the world to lead with values through the 14 Fellowships in the Aspen Global Leadership Network. Fellowships can be based on location (Africa, Central America, the Middle East, South Carolina) or a specific field (education, public service, health, finance). Fellows are nominated when they are at an inflection point in their lives and careers, meaning they have achieved a high level of professional success and are looking toward the broader roles they might take in their communities or globally. Over the course of two years, Fellows take part in four seminars, including the classic Aspen Seminar, that challenge them to examine their leadership values, the good society, and their places in it. To date, more than 2,200 leaders—mostly business leaders—in 49 countries have been challenged to move from success to significance by using their creative energies and resources to tackle the most challenging issues of our time—such as poverty, sustainability and energy projects, impact investing, health-care systems, disaster response. Fellows leave the Institute inspired to step up and take action. Some choose to partner with community groups to provide direct services to underserved populations. Others leave lucrative jobs in the private sector to become public servants. Here, we look at mem-

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bers of the Aspen Global Leadership Network who are using their businesses as platforms for change. In the process, they are raising the bar for their industries as a whole and reimagining the ways businesses can have a positive impact on society.

Yan Yan: Clearing the Air in China As president of SOHO China, China’s leader in prime office properties in Beijing and Shanghai, Yan Yan is responsible for project investment, business development, and overall management of the company. Based in Beijing, SOHO China is widely recognized as one of China’s highest-profile companies both domestically and abroad. It has even been named by Fortune magazine as one of China’s “Most Admired Companies” six times consecutively from 2006 to 2012. In 2014, she joined the second class of the Aspen Global Leadership Network’s China Fellowship Program. Being a part of the China Fellowship Program encouraged Yan to use her role to spur progress on one of China’s biggest environmental challenges: air pollution. It’s no secret that Beijing has a smog problem. The quality of the air we breathe is a daily concern for those of us living here. Emissions from cars, coal-power plants, and other industries have led to high amounts of pollution in the air, causing public-health issues like asthma, bronchitis, and even

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IMPACT: LEADERSHIP INITIATIVES Coufal

cancer. When I was accepted into the Institute’s China Fellowship Program in 2014 and asked to tackle a challenge that was important to me, I didn’t have to look very far. For years, my company, SOHO China, has been pioneering ways to cut energy consumption in our buildings. As the leading developer of branded prime office property in Beijing and Shanghai, we’ve developed a smart Building Energy Savings System (BESS) that maximizes energy efficiency and reduces consumption by up to 30 percent, helping to reduce carbon emissions. We have the scale and the influence to set the example for our industry, but we weren’t terribly active in doing so. When Aspen challenged me to step up and stretch my leadership, this was my opportunity. My Fellowship project is to become a leading voice in energy efficiency by educating the public—as well as our industry peers—about its benefits. Today, we host students, business leaders, architects, and government officials to learn about our environmentally friendly technology and to encourage other developers to implement the same technology in their own buildings. We have had over 250 visits to our BESS demonstration center, reaching over 4,000 business leaders, environmentalists, and public officials. And this is just the beginning: I am also currently reaching out to my peers in the industry to make the case for BESS in their businesses as well. With another Fellow in my class, Jianyu Zhang of the Environmental Defense Fund in China, I am helping to develop and promote the sharing-economy concept in China. In May, we organized a forum featuring leaders from new and successful tech companies to discuss how the sharing economy can create smart solutions for sharing cars, space, and roads in Beijing and help solve even more of the environmental and economic challenges we face.

Adam Lowry: Scrubbing a Dirty Industry Adam Lowry is co-founder and co-CEO of Ripple Foods, which seeks to change the dairy market with high-protein plant-based milks. Before Ripple, Lowry was co-founder and chief greenskeeper of Method Products, PBC—an innovator in sustainable home-cleaning products. In 2010, he was chosen to be part of the Institute’s environmentally focused Catto Fellowship Program. Lowry believes that the purpose of business is to create societal and environmental benefit. He was recognized as a 2013 John P. McNulty Prize laureate for his Ocean Plastic Project at Method, which pioneered a new approach for sourcing, recycling, and marketing plastic harvested from the vast garbage patches polluting the Pacific. Lowry says his Fellowship helps him make values-based decisions while leading a global company. When I co-founded Method, 14 years ago, I looked at the landscape of home-cleaning products on the market and asked a question: which was dirtier—what we’re cleaning up, or what we’re cleaning with? With products full of toxic ingredients and unsustainable manufacturing practices, cleaning is a dirty business. Business can and should be a powerful agent of change, and as a pioneer of premium planet-friendly home, fabric, and personal-care products, Method is playing that role. I constantly try to reinforce the connection between what we do on a day-to-day basis and the impact it has on the world at large. As a Catto Fellow, I’ve looked to the Institute as a source of inspiration to continue making that connection. At the 2014 Aspen Action Forum, I made an Action Pledge to build a world-class manufacturing facility in the Midwest region of the United States. As a native son of the Great Lakes region, I saw the downfall of the manufacturing sector in that part of the country. So bringing greencollar, high-quality manufacturing jobs to that area is really important to me. I’m pleased to say that with the opening of our LEED-Platinum-certified South Side Soapbox manufacturing plant in Chicago, we’re doing just that. It’s setting new standards in clean-soap manufacturing, operating at the highest levels of efficiency and sustainability. We designed the factory so that it

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would send zero material to landﬁlls. Everything that comes in is used in products, recycled, or composted. We generate 50 percent of our energy onsite through wind- and solar-power generators to reduce our carbon footprint. And our roof actually serves as a 75,000-square-foot greenhouse that will produce 500 tons of fresh, pesticide-free produce annually for the local community and surrounding retail and restaurant market. For the South Side of Chicago, an area considered a food desert, this is a valuable resource. The global perspective I’ve developed from the Aspen Institute inspires how we develop Method’s strategy and scale. We hope to show everyone that by integrating social and environmental performance into our manufacturing, we can create a more prosperous and sustainable world.

Leighton Lord:

Opportunities Rising from the Ashes Leighton Lord is a senior partner with Nexsen Pruet, one of the largest law firms in the Carolinas, and founder and managing director of Nexsen’s communications and crisis-management affiliate, NP Strategy. Lord also serves as the chairman of Santee Cooper, South Carolina’s state-owned electric and water utility, the largest generator of power in South Carolina. In 2008, he joined the third class of the Liberty Fellowship Program, which focuses on building exemplary leaders in South Carolina. Lord currently serves as a seminar moderator for the Aspen Global Leadership Network and the Liberty Fellowship, helping to shape the experiences of Fellows. He says that being part of a network of trusted peers with diverse perspectives helped shape his thinking around a major business and environmental challenge facing the Santee Cooper electric and water utility. Coal ash is a general term for the by-product of burning coal. Traditionally, it has been used as a raw material in cement, asphalt for roads, and in industrial rubbers and plastics. Surplus ash is mixed with water and put into what are known as “coal-ash ponds.” If not properly built or maintained, these ponds pose a long-term environmental risk for leaching or spilling into clean-water sources as well as a risk for disasters like the recent Dan River coal-ash spill in North Carolina. As chairman of Santee Cooper, South Carolina’s largest electricity generator, it was my job to figure out what to do with the coal-ash ponds from our retiring coal-power plants. This is where being part of the Liberty Fellowship in South Carolina was key. Fellows in the Liberty Fellowship are very close. We see each other regularly—at happy hours, dinners, or alumni events—and build genuine relationships with each other, even if we’re on opposite sides of an issue. Generally in the world of utilities and environmentalists, the operating atmosphere is one of gamesmanship, posturing, and hostility. It’s hard to take anyone at their word. But with the space created by the Liberty Fellowship, I know that if I called other Fellows for advice, they would give it to me straight. I spoke to environmentalists, hydrologists, and other leaders in the network, and they told me which solutions would lead to progress—and which ones would lead to lawsuits. With their help, we proposed a solution to solve two problems at once— the need to get coal ash out of pits near surface water and the need for a new source of dry ash within the industry. We partnered with a South Carolina company and helped them construct a $40 million facility at one of our operating coal plants to prepare pond ash for reuse by industry. Today, coal ash from all of Santee Cooper’s unlined coal-ash ponds is being mined, processed, and sold to the cement, paint, plastics, and rubber industries. Our operation is mining over 400,000 tons of coal ash a year. The good problem we face is that our program is so successful, we will soon run out of coal ash. The input of my Fellows was invaluable in this whole process. It wasn’t just the substance of our conversations but the mutual trust that helped me reach a decision with the confidence to know I was placing the right bet for our company, community, and the environment.

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All photos Courtesy of the African Wildlife Foundation

ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT PROGRAM

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ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT PROGRAM

If the international community does not act quickly, poaching for ivory could kill off Africa’s wild elephants within a decade. Recognizing the extent of its ivory and rhino-horn trade, alongside its growing investment in Africa, Chinese civil-society leaders recently joined their African counterparts to consider how conservation could be an official part of African Union policy and Chinese government investment. The Institute led the discussion.

By David Monsma and Nicole Buckley

ruger National Park, in South Africa, is facing a threat that could damage its entire ecosystem. At any given time, as many as 45 poachers working in teams hunt in the park for elephant tusk and rhino horn, which bring in significant money through illegal trade. An estimated 8 percent of Africa’s elephant population is being poached annually—a rate at which elephant populations may not survive another ten years in the wild. The population of black rhinos has declined by over 97 percent since the 1960s, and last year, South Africa lost more than a thousand rhinos to poachers, most of them from Kruger. The threat is so great that even when park officials are able to rescue rhinos orphaned by poachers, the location of the orphaned animals must remain undisclosed to prevent further attacks. The park is huge—about the same size as New Jersey, 8,000 square miles—providing a significant security challenge for park rangers on the ground. Faced with the staggering impact of the illegal horn and tusk trades between Africa and Asia, the Chinese government is beginning to recognize that the critical losses occurring daily require new types of cooperation on wildlife protection across the African continent. China has been a particular locus of the trade, estimated to account for some 70 percent of international ivory flows. China’s close economic involvement with Africa also makes it particularly interested in being part of the solution—China has built more than 2,000 kilometers of railways and 3,000 kilometers of highways on the continent, and it has pledged to invest at least $60 billion in Africa. Experts fear that the disappearance of rhinos and elephants could have vast consequences not only for Africa’s biodiversity but for the growth of lo-

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of Africa’s elephant population is being poached annually—a

rate at which elephant populations may not survive another ten years in the wild.

cal economies. They emphasize the need to stem global demand while developing alternate economic opportunities for the communities living around the parks. To further the development of a vision for China-Africa cooperation on wildlife and wildland conservation and governance, the Institute—in partnership with the African Wildlife Foundation and with support from the World Bank—hosted a high-level roundtable dialogue series in 2014 and 2015 with African and Chinese civil-society leaders and experts. Dialogue meetings took place in Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, and China over the two-year period. Based on the meetings, participants submitted formal recommendations to the African Union to protect Africa’s wildlife and lands, supported by former presidents Festus Mogae of Botswana and Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania. The recommendations, submitted in late 2014, advocated for an expansion of the African Union’s definition of natural resources from its

Clockwise from top: Patrick Bergin; Phillip Idro; David Monsma and Alikiba; Tebogo Lefifi; dialogue participants view wildlife in Kruger National Park.

“

This trip gave dialogue participants a chance to see and hear firsthand about the devastation that poaching has wrought on Kruger’s rhino population

”

focus on extraction to including the high-value potential of conservation activities—including community lands, conservancies, and corridors. The recommendations were successfully integrated as a priority in the continent’s published development agenda, known as the African Union’s Vision 2063 Plan. Last December, African and Chinese participants met for a three-day field visit and roundtable dialogue at Kruger National Park, the center of Africa’s rhino-poaching crisis. As Chinese President Xi Jinping prepared to meet with African heads of state in Johannesburg the following week, dialogue participants worked to elevate wildlife issues within the agenda of the official China-Africa talks. The group was honored to have Chinese film star Wang Baoqiang and Tanzanian singer-songwriter Alikiba join the effort as cultural ambassadors who can draw further attention to the group’s work. “This trip gave dialogue participants a chance to see and hear firsthand

about the devastation that poaching has wrought on Kruger’s rhino population,” said African Wildlife Foundation CEO Patrick Bergin. For many of the participants from China, including actor Wang Baoqiang, the trip to Kruger was their first time visiting a national park in Africa. Alikiba, a wildlife ambassador in his native Tanzania, noted that celebrities as well as government leaders and conservationists have a role to play in protecting wildlife. “My country has lost many of its elephants in the last few years to poaching,” he said. “We must all find ways to work together to stop the killing and safeguard our wildland. As a musician and artist, I am using my platform to inspire people to get involved.” The Institute’s close relationship with the African Wildlife Foundation, led by Bergin and Chief Scientist Philip Muruthi, has been crucial to this initiative’s success. This partnership has allowed the Institute to dive deeply into challenges of poaching and wildland protection and to connect with champions on the ground in Africa. With wildlife issues now formally adopted into China-Africa cooperation planning, the Institute initiative has set the stage for a deeper partnership on conservation. The importance of providing stable sources of income to African communities living within and adjacent to wildland, and of understanding conservation’s benefits for the people of Africa and China, will remain a top priority for the group as the Institute continues to tackle these urgent issues.

David Monsma is executive director of the Institute’s Energy and Environment Program, and Nicole Buckley oversees the program’s environment work.

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YEARS OF

NEW LEADERS

AT SOCRATES The Socrates Program celebrates two decades by connecting a new generation of leaders at the Institute’s roundtables and around the world.

Few people would say no to spending time in Aspen— especially if the time is spent discussing today’s biggest ideas with some of the country’s brightest young leaders. The Socrates Program this year celebrated its 20th anniversary, having blossomed into a way to engage and connect young professionals across the United States and the world. “It has proven itself in the market in a way unmatched by any other Aspen seminar program,” says Elliot Gerson, executive vice president of the Institute, “and it has generated great loyalty, with many people coming back year after year.” Around a Socrates table, you’ll find entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and government representatives debating passionately with academics and journalists. 50

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Discussions are built around texts selected for their potential to facilitate an exchange of ideas. At a roundtable discussion on the sharing economy, for example, participants may begin with Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and the foundations of a capitalist economy and then evolve to Airbnb’s business model. (Does it ultimately create or eliminate jobs? And how is it sustainable?) Texts and moderators provide a foundational framework, and the conversation builds from the real-world experiences participants eagerly offer. The off-the-record format encourages complete candor. The program tackles topics that cut across industries and have applications in nearly every sector of the workforce, like the sustainability of the American dream,

Photos courtesy of the Socrates Program

BY ALISON DECKER

SOCRATES PROGRAM

“Twitter saved my life”: Egyptian activist Mona Eltahawy, who moderated Socrates soon after Tahrir Square tweets assured her release from police detention. IDEAS

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SOCRATES PROGRAM the competition between China and the United States, foreign policy in the age of ISIS, the 21st-century meaning of citizenship, and the impact of technology on the way the world does business. Moderators bring both their own expertise and a specific set of discussion-guidance skills developed for Socrates; they are all experts from diverse fields, like the Kennedy School political scientist Joe Nye, the former Federal Communications Commision Chairman Michael Powell, the medical ethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, the former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey, the economist Sonal Shah, and the economic journalist Kai Ryssdal. Anne-Marie Slaughter, the president and CEO of the New America Foundation, has led discussions on striking a balance between work and family for both women and men; Jeffrey Rosen, the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, has moderated several post-9/11 seminars in both the United States and Europe that navigate the intersections of technology, transparency, and privacy. “The difference between cocktail-party conversation and a Socrates seminar,” says Neil Jacobstein, Socrates moderator and the former president of Singularity University, “is that the seminar includes a set of seminal readings on values-based issues, rules about respectful dialogue, and a group commitment to 360-degree understanding of issues rather than winning an argument.” The conversations happen in a variety of venues. Three-day

Laura and Gary Lauder

seminars are held in Aspen twice yearly, in February and July, and over long holiday weekends to minimize time away from the office. At the July seminars, there are up to 20 participants each in five different sessions, which run concurrently; the February seminars operate similarly but offer three concurrent sessions. There’s also a Teen Socrates for high-schoolers. Evening programs allow established and emerging leaders to share their successes and challenges: Michael Bloomberg spoke to a Socrates audience in Aspen about good leadership, based on his years in business and public office; Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg shared her insights on decisions for women’s rights. The Socrates annual dinner, held each summer in Aspen, has hosted an array of leaders, including then-Senator Barack Obama, Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, Institute Trustee Leonard Lauder, Atlanta Mayor Kassim Reed, entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, and Senator John McCain. Socrates also hosts one-day salons in cities across the United States, including New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; there are custom seminars, Senate Socrates seminars for congressional staff, and new seminars that bring together community leaders to discuss pressing social-justice issues. With an alumni group of more than 5,000 people from 30 countries, Socrates gives participants entry into an international professional network and also serves as an access point to other Institute programs. Along with the Aspen Seminar and public programs, including the

STARTING SOCRATES: THE FOUNDERS SPEAK LAURA LAUDER, Aspen Institute Trustee: Socrates for us is a love story. It started when Gary had an experience at the Aspen Institute when he was about 18, when he did a one-day program for teenagers on Billy Budd. He fell in love with the intellectual dialogue with his peers. He loved the structured Socratic dialogue with people of his own generation who were going through life and facing the same complexities at the same time, and they were all trying to face them together. The first weekend he and I met, in Silicon Valley, we had a long drive in which we debated capital punishment. He was for it; I was against it. We cited all these intellectual giants we thought supported our sides. We found we agreed to disagree—that we could feel passionately about something and come to a civilized resolution without necessarily changing each other’s mind. But most of all, we loved intellectual debate. He said, “I really want to bring you to the Aspen Institute.” It was a kind of test: I’m really interested in this young woman, but I can’t really pour my heart into her unless she enjoys the Aspen Institute. We went together to Charlie Firestone’s seminar, “Dilemmas of the Digital Age.” That was Gary’s first seminar at the Institute. He was barely 31, I was about the same age. It was a revelation for the two of us. We fell in love—with each other, the dialogue, the sources, the reading, the inspiration,

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SOCRATES PROGRAM Aspen Ideas Festival, Socrates is one of the few Institute programs open to the public for a fee rather than by invitation only. Institute Trustee Arjun Gupta, a technology entrepreneur, was first introduced to the Institute via Socrates seminar, “Entrepreneurship in a New Century: Values, Ethics, and Challenges.” “It opened the door to extraordinary opportunities,” he says. “I became a Henry Crown Fellow and was recruited to become a Trustee. Socrates really is a gateway for young leaders to a path of lifelong learning with the Institute.” Camaraderie and connection are cornerstones of nearly all Institute events, but they are a particularly strong draw for Socrates. Participants are provided ample time for relationship-building and outdoor activities beyond the structured discussions. So while the formal dialogue might stay at the table, informal conversations, ideas, and connections continue to take root outside. People can spend four hours talking about how artificial intelligence will change the future workforce and then venture out to ski, hike, and discuss race and culture or social media and the arts—or the wildlife they find on the trails. “And that’s where the great ideas happening in the seminars turn into action with impact and lasting connections,” says Melissa Ingber, director of the Socrates Program. “A conversation goes from ‘I never thought of this issue that way’ to ‘Let’s take this idea and start a new business.’ ”

everything. Three years later, after we were married and living in Silicon Valley, we said to each other, ‘That was such a great experience, but we were the youngest in the room by ten—and more like 20—years.’ We thought of how exciting and interesting it would be for the Institute to reach out to people in their late 20s and early 30s who were building the new information superhighway. We faced a good deal of doubt from the then-leadership of the Institute, which didn’t think the group had the time or financial resources to commit to the Institute programs then offered. We were sure we had something, though. Gary’s father, Leonard, a board member, was totally behind the idea from the start. The CEO agreed to review our proposal and offered to try it one time just to see what would happen. We asked Charlie Firestone to moderate and invited about 150 people. We had to organize it ourselves. We weren’t on the national calendar of the Institute. They gave us no staff support. It was 1996, the Internet was in its infancy, and the Institute had nothing online. We had done an online birth announcement for our son, Josh, in 1995, and sent a link to our ten friends who had email addresses with a recording of Josh’s first cry. It went viral! We sent out invitations to Socrates by email, and we were the first program to have online registration. It was like pulling teeth to get the Institute to receive registrations and take Visa cards online. Fifty people paid $300 per person for the weekend in Aspen in 1996. We were barely married two years, we had a one-year-old, and we hosted the “Socrates Society” of the

Julia Sweig, moderator

Aspen Institute. We wanted people to understand in advance that they’d possibly read Socrates and have a Socratic dialogue. From the beginning, we used the Aspen campus and people stayed at the Meadows. And when they came, people loved talking with their peers, socializing in the evenings, and having the whole thing be just a weekend. Our generation had never been presented with opportunities to think of the kinds of issues I would talk about with friends in Silicon Valley: Are you interested in foreign policy toward Russia? How do we protect ourselves? What are the tradeoffs between security and liberty in US foreign policy? People didn’t have that chance outside college. To find moderators, I would talk to Leonard and others to identify experts in their fields. At the time, the Institute did not allow anyone from outside to moderate—only in-house, well-trained moderators. Today, all aspects of the Institute have wonderful moderators who are from a wide, wide variety of fields. Early on, David Gergen offered a seminar on values-based leadership. We announced it online and it sold out in ten minutes. It crashed the system. We’d never thought to cap the number of spots, we were so brand new: 30 people signed up in ten minutes, and the room could only take 25. About ten years later, a wonderful man named Bill Budinger loved the seminar and helped us financially support it. He said we should do programs at the Wye, Maryland, campus and suggested a program where we’d invite staffers from the Senate to interact with each other. So once a year in October, we hold Senate Socrates at Wye with ten to 12 participants

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg, speaker, with Jeffrey Rosen, moderator Tom Friedman, speaker

Ezekiel Emanuel, moderator

from Congress, half Republicans and half Democrats, and participants from the public and private sectors. A year after we started Socrates, Gary was nominated for the first class of the Henry Crown Fellowship Program. Crown participants have to identify a project they will work on. Gary used Socrates as his Crown leadership project. That helped bring it more into the Institute. GARY LAUDER, President, Lauder Partners: The earlier that people go through programs, the stronger the impact. Most had been for people wealthy enough to be semi-retired. It dawned on me that that was at the wrong end of their lives. In 1992, when I brought Laura to Charlie Firestone’s seminar, we both loved it and thought that would be of broader interest to people. People would tell us, “It’s great to have young people coming”—and we were the only young people around. Now, 20 years later, I’ve been to 30 or 40 Socrates seminars. The process has helped change me. It has improved my thought processes. I never want to miss one. WILLIAM D. BUDINGER, Aspen Institute Trustee: I was not involved with the Institute when Socrates began. The program was an outlier. Gary and Laura dreamed it up and worked really hard to bring in their friends, primarily in the tech industry, to introduce them to the beauty of the Aspen Socratic moderated seminar. The seminars would go into these various topics in depth; often the world’s leading experts would moderate, and Gary and Laura were able to bring them in. What Gary and Laura did was create one of the new crown jewels of the Institute.

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As time went on, instead of being an outlying adjunct, Socrates slowly and imperceptibly moved toward the mainstream of the Institute. The beauty of the program today is that we often have waiting lists for our seminars. Those waiting lists are filled with people who have a pretty good chance of being tomorrow’s leaders in business, nonprofits, even government. Socrates gives us a chance to touch those people, introduce them to something they haven’t thought of since college. It brings them back into the joy of learning. I’ve done several Executive Seminars and many Socrates seminars. The Executive Seminar is six days long; Socrates is usually three days. The Executive Seminar is primarily a greatbooks seminar—all seminars, including Socrates, are readingsbased, and participants get a kit of readings in advance. The Executive Seminar brings you back into the classics of literature and economics and philosophy; Socrates is topical—about Islam, privacy versus security. And, of course, every seminar Aspen puts on has a component of values-based thinking. Good moderators tend to be inviting people. They don’t put off or scare people—it’s a natural part of their personality. They’re experts in their fields: not only do they know the readings cold, the readings are excerpts and they know the full work. That allows them to give color and perspective participants might otherwise not get. But the key to a good moderator is the ability to stimulate and excite discussion from all of the participants. Our best moderators are really good at that. No one gets away without contributing. For Senate Socrates at Wye, people of very different passions and opinions get together and discuss something that at least in

SOCRATES PROGRAM The connections don’t end in Aspen—and after their long days at the seminars, participants don’t leave their feet up for long. They seek ways to bring new ideas back to their work and communities, and tangible results happen. Take Zitto Z. Kabwe, a member of the Tanzanian Parliament who attended “The New Global Middle Class: How Rising Consumption Will Transform Innovation, Trade, and Markets.” After returning to Tanzania, he wrote an article for a local newspaper and initiated a project that works to lift roughly 100,000 low-income palm-oil farmers into the middle class. Kabwe both sought and received advice and support from his new Socratesformed network of like-minded peers. Socrates became a part of the Institute through a stroke of inspiration. Gary and Laura Lauder, while sitting in a seminar on the digital age—moderated by the director of the Aspen Communications and Society Program, Charlie Firestone—asked themselves: What if everyone in the room was in their late 20s or 30s, like us? At their invitation, Firestone agreed to moderate a condensed, weekend-long version of his week-long digital seminar, selecting readings from Aristotle and Plato to explore the tensions between values like liberty and security. (See: “Socrates: The Founders Speak,” page 52.) “The readings are important, but it’s not the goal to figure out what the authors would say about a topic,” Firestone says. “It’s how to think about a topic. It’s the experience of grappling with an issue or a text and then finding meaning for yourself. You gain new insights in the tension of values.”

A CONVERSATION “GOES FROM ‘I NEVER THOUGHT OF THIS ISSUE THAT WAY’ TO ‘LET’S TAKE THIS IDEA AND START A NEW BUSINESS.’

”

the beginning is somewhat neutral. It’s a chance to bring Democrats and Republicans together working on issues that are usually partisan and get them in the habit of talking to each other. One of the astonishing things about Senate Socrates is the number of high-level staffers who have not had much or any conversation with staffers on the other side of the aisle. People would be shocked at how little of that happens. How much does being at a seminar in Aspen make a difference? Everyone will give you a different answer. Mine: the Aspen experience, meaning the mountain experience, adds to the magic. It becomes one more thing the participants don’t usually have. You get off the plane in Aspen, especially if you haven’t been, and—wow. It’s an emotional reaction, and it sets the stage for a weekend of new experiences. That said, when we hold Socrates events in other places—and we do and are going to do more—they are still fabulous. One of the things that’s really heartening to watch is the effect of an Aspen-style seminar on the participants. Wolf Blitzer will be on stage and say that it changed his life. I’ve heard the same thing from many others. When I went through the Executive Seminar, I thought, “Why didn’t I go through this 30 years ago? I would have been much clearer on what I was about, what was important to me, what was important to pursue.” One of the lasting effects of the seminar experience is to clarify objectives. I hate to admit it, but I went through a lot of my early life thinking I knew what I was doing but not really knowing. The Executive Seminar helped remove a lot of that fog. I’d like to see us develop a way to bring the benefits of that seminar experience to more of the world’s future leaders. Socrates is embarking on that path, and it’s really exciting. It makes people truly better leaders—it builds the person, not the résumé. Budinger IDEAS

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SOCRATES PROGRAM Leonard Lauder, speaker

Barack Obama, speaker

Arjun Gupta, participant Michael Bloomberg, speaker

Jana Nelson, participant

David Headley, participant Hari Sreenivasan, moderator

Michelle Lapinski, moderator Nkechi Iheme, participant

Gregory Chang, participant

Jared Cohen, speaker

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Leigh Hafrey, moderator

SOCRATES PROGRAM “The great thing about Socrates is that it takes the kinds of people who usually talk and gets them to listen,” says the health specialist and cosmonaut Esther Dyson, who has both moderated and attended Socrates seminars. “You learn so much more by considering other people’s arguments than by restating your own. Anyone can go online to hear beautifully polished statements, but what you get at Socrates is real engagement between people who have deeply considered views and also open minds.” “It’s a better connection with other people than you make if you’re in a conference room,” says Nkechi Iheme, a national-security specialist who works in Facebook’s Washington office and who started participating in Socrates programs when she was working in a Senate office. Iheme says she regularly sees professional and personal friends she met in Aspen, including at the recent Washington, DC, “Tech Prom,” where “everyone is from Socrates.” In April, Socrates held a local seminar on race and law enforcement with young leaders from Baltimore and Washington on how to keep communities safe. Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore, and Kevin Davis, the Baltimore police commissioner, joined a discussion on the challenges of policing without racial bias. “We see problems happening across America,” Ingber says, “and we use our platform to bring young leaders together for constructive conversation, problem solving, and building local networks.” With the help of various scholarships and partnerships, Socrates is able to bring in a variety of perspectives. The William D. Budinger Scholarship helps public officials attend the Socrates Program; it enabled Kabwe, for example, to travel from Tanzania. The Ricardo Salinas Foundation Scholarship Fund brings Latino voices to the Socrates tables; one distinguished example is Salinas scholar D. Scott Martinez, the Denver city attorney. The Nathanson Scholarship, founded by Trustees Marc and Jane Nathanson, brings public-diplomacy officials from the Broadcasting Board of Governors and the State Department to seminars. Socrates also maintains partnerships with the Air Force Academy, Teach For America, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, among others, which value the program’s opportunities for professional development. Socrates has gone global as well. In 2012, it held its first seminar in Cuba, “The Making of Modern Cuba,” which Gupta called a “remarkable opportunity to explore each other’s views on politics, culture, and our economies.” For the past five years, Socrates seminars have been held in Spain in partnership with the Aspen Institute España and, most recently, in Kyiv, Ukraine, with Aspen Institute Kyiv. This year alone, Socrates will hold seminars in Ukraine, Mexico, Spain, and Serbia. And international seminars bring people back across oceans. On any given Socrates weekend, there are typically more than a dozen international participants. “It has become one of our most exportable programs, attracting enormous interest from our partners around the world,” Gerson says. And maybe even farther: “We’ll be the first Aspen program to discuss the ethics of interplanetary exploration,” Ingber says— “on Mars.”

ATTENDING SOCRATES: POWERFUL AWAKENINGS By Bill Resnick I think of the Socrates Seminars as intensive graduate seminars with leading thinkers on topics that have real-world relevance— ones I get to participate in, with interesting and accomplished fellow students. I’ve attended 11 over the past 13 years, and the appeal is always an opportunity to dig deep through curated readings and facilitated discussions and to come out with increased Resnick knowledge and wisdom, having challenged yourself to learn something new. I love learning, and this is a chance to dip into the experience of being a student without having to take a test or write a paper. It’s also a great atmosphere for meeting new people. I’ve made some great connections both in the sessions and through the social activities surrounding the schedule. Every session offers something new to think about, but two in particular stick out. In 2004, Jim Steyer, the founder of Common Sense Media, and Marty Kaplan, the Norman Lear Professor of Entertainment, Media, and Society at the University of Southern California, moderated a seminar called “Media and the Public Interest.” I was ignorant, as most citizens are, of the history of the public airwaves and how the mandate that broadcasters provide public-service airtime in exchange for having control of a public good had eroded over a few decades. If we look today at the way our airwaves disseminate information and entertainment, it is clear that the dilution of federal regulations on broadcasting have contributed to a dumbing down of the American public. This was a powerful awakening for me. Another impactful session was “Religion and Politics in America” in 2006, moderated by Rabbi David Saperstein, then the political voice of Reform Judaism, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the politician and oldest child of the late Robert Kennedy. Rather than focus on the division of church and state, the session discussed the appropriate ways we can bring our values into the public sphere. I had the great pleasure of riding up in the gondola with Harris Wofford to a dinner at the top of Aspen Mountain. Wofford told me about his involvement in starting the Peace Corps. We also spoke about his long partnership with his best friend, Matthew Charlton, after 48 years of marriage to a woman, Clare. Matthew, who was also on the gondola, was the subject of a moving essay Wofford wrote ten years later in The New York Times, where he also recently announced their marriage. This conversation—unexpected, serendipitous—was a quintessential Aspen Institute experience. Bill Resnick, MD, MBA, and CEO of Beit T-Shuvah, is a longtime participant in Socrates seminars. He now attends with his husband, Michael J. Stubbs.

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“There has not been one revolution that has not been sparked and led by youth,” said Dr. Janice K. Jackson, the chief education officer of Chicago Public Schools, at the opening ceremony of the Aspen Challenge in Chicago. Launched in a new US city each year, the Aspen Challenge asks students from partner high schools to pioneer the changes they want to see in the world. The Aspen Challenge was held for the first time in Chicago this year and then returned to Washington, DC, where many of the nation’s top leaders and creative thinkers issued teams of high-school students problems and asked them to design solutions. For example, inventor and entrepreneur Jessica O. Williams asked teams to re-imagine urban spaces with access to areas to be creative and play; Youth Empowered Solutions’s Kim Reese and Andrea Boakye challenged teams to expand the availability of fresh, nutritious, and affordable foods for communities that do not have access to it; and Moneythink’s Daniel Rogers asked teams to teach their peers about the financial rules that govern them. “We want them to have qualities that allow them to think broadly,” said Mike Bezos, the vice president and cofounder of the Bezos Family Foundation. The idea is to show students the power that they already have, to “not just observe a problem but solve it,” said Arne Duncan, the former US secretary of education and a Henry Crown Fellow. When they weren’t working, the students received some motivational words from Nick Davis, the very first Aspen Challenge winner—his team built an aquaponic greenhouse—who is now a student leader at Northwestern University. They also heard from Chicago hometown hero Chancelor Bennett, “Chance the Rapper,” who has launched several programs to promote social change in the community. Equipped with tools and support, teams then designed solutions to their selected challenges. Seven weeks later, in April, in a day-long competition, the teams presented their solutions to a panel of judges and answered tough, practical questions about their work. After long deliberations, the judges selected four winning teams—three from Chicago and one from Washington, DC—to showcase their work at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Previous Challenge groups have had great successes. A Los Angeles team started CultivATE, a program in which students can take a class to learn how to grow and cook vegetables. Students in Washington, DC, implemented a peer-mentoring program that helps kids find peaceful resolutions to conflicts. It’s because of stories like these that Representative John Lewis told the Aspen Challenge participants, You “will emerge leaders not just of America but of the world.” For more information, go to aspenchallenge.org. 58

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THE WINNERS SCHOOL Roald Amundsen High School CITY

Chicago

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Mitigate the harmful effects of light pollution

SCHOOL Lindblom Math and Science Academy CITY

Chicago

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Improve the financial literacy of the community

SCHOOL Roberto Clemente Community Academy CITY

Chicago

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Unify unlikely urban allies to unleash the peace

SCHOOL Paul Laurence Dunbar High School CITY

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Reimagine urban spaces to give all kids the opportunity to play

Photos: Dan Bayer

By Sacha Zimmerman

ASPEN CHALLENGE

Duncan

Davis

“I’m a big believer in not just youth voice but youth ideas and youth action.” —Arne Duncan

Lewis

Bennett IDEAS

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INNOVATE FORWARD We started with Illinois R a i l r o a d but we were never constrained by a predetermined tr ac k . We could say that the s k y i s the o n l y l i m i t t o o u r c reativit y, but since we have b e e n helping s end human s deep into spac e sinc e Ap ollo 11 , we have already been to the moon and back. Even so, we know that to voyage into unknown frontiers, innovation isn’t just a catch phrase. It’s a necessity. Learn how you can INNOVATE FORWARD with Booz Allen. www.boozallen.com

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The Aspen Journal of Ideas offers thought-provoking analysis and issue-defining information from the programs and partners of the Institute. The digital magazine, updated weekly, is at aspen.us/journal.

RESTORING THE GRAY ZONE The United States became the nation it is today thanks to a pursuit of freedom of religion. Yet terrorism, fear, and culture wars have all led to more divisive black-and-white thinking about religion—and less tolerance. But in the gray zone, religious diversity is a strength, not a point of contention. Meryl Justin Chertoff explores the work of the Institute’s Inclusive America Project.

HOW TO WIN THE LATINO VOTE With two million more Latinos eligible to vote in this year’s presidential election than in the last, whichever political party manages to harness Latino voting power could be the difference between going to the White House or going home. Matt A. Barreto and David Damore do the math.

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I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance, or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others. On the contrary, we are bound, you, I, and every one, to make common cause, even with error itself, to maintain the common right of freedom of conscience. â€”Letter of Thomas Jefferson to Edward Dowse

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THE GRAY ZONE Religious diversity is a fact of US and global life—but religious tolerance increasingly is not, as has become evident during the presidential campaign.

he other. Throughout history, the other—the outsider— has been feared, villainized, and ostracized. His faith is different, her holidays or style of dress is not the same as ours, and maybe there’s a language barrier. As history bears witness, identity difference can easily become a source of social tension, discrimination, and conflict. This has led to disaster in many nations, and the United States has not been immune. Many minority communities in the United States have faced periods of bigotry and persecution. But with the support of a constitutional commitment to religious free exercise, Americans have become a nation of immigrants and refugees—an essential attribute that makes the United States exceptional. E pluribus unum: Out of many, one. To honor and reinforce that commitment, in 2012 the Justice and Society Program launched the Inclusive America Project under co-chairs Madeleine Albright and David Gergen. Project leaders recognized that both global forces and fractionalization in US communities required a more intentional approach to religious pluralism. The project’s 2013 report, “Principled Pluralism: Report of the Inclusive America Project,” focused on three areas: • Bridging differences among religions, the focus of traditional interfaith engagement. • Bridging differences between people of faith and the unaffiliated (“nones”)—a fast-growing group in the United States, particularly among millennials. • Bridging intrafaith differences between more tolerant members of liberal denominations within a faith and their orthodox or fundamentalist counterparts. Perhaps presciently, in their foreword to the report, the co-chairs noted that past accomplishments do not guarantee future success. The report and two subsequent case studies focused in part on the largely intergenerational challenges posed by the influence of conservative evangelical Christian and Catholic values in debates

on social issues, such as same-sex marriage. Some of the biggest challenges involve how Muslims are viewed in America. Working on the project, we were constantly challenged in our thinking by our civilsociety partners, who rightly focused on the impact of discrimination against American Muslims—an overwhelmingly integrated, highly educated, and highly productive segment of society—against the concerns of security-minded observers, who counseled that eliding all reference to the challenge of radicalization made our conclusions vulnerable to the charge of naïveté. Our reports focused by choice on the United States and on positive prescriptions. We recommended that youth-service organizations help those they serve build a more inclusive sense of what it means to be American. We asked religiously affiliated organizations to commit to making at least one interfaith effort each year as part of their programming. We recommended that media outlets do more to feature positive stories on minority-faith communities. Finally, we recommended that the federal government, which in the aftermath of 9/11 had initiated an effort known as “countering violent extremism,” begin to turn those efforts over to communities affected by extremism and let Muslim groups take the lead. As we put the finishing touches on the most recent Inclusive America Project report last year, our view was that increased religious literacy and bridge-building at the community level would be enough to put out the brush fires of discrimination against American Muslims and that polling and demographics would point overwhelmingly to a more inclusive America. This was, of course, before the attacks in Paris, Istanbul, San Bernardino, and Brussels perpetrated by the Islamic State and its adherents, and before the 2016 presidential election’s descent into xenophobia and nativism. What we failed to anticipate was that certain aspiring populist presidential candidates would be studying the writings of notorious hatemongers and purveyors of Islamophobia, such as Frank Gaffney,

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IDEAS In the gray zone, a girl can wear a hijab without being harassed and a young man can grow his beard. Girls go to school. Young people of both sexes socialize together. Eliminate the gray zone and young people are faced with the binary choice of zealotry or apostasy.

who has claimed that agents of the Muslim Brotherhood have infiltrated the federal government and both major political parties; Pamela Geller, who spearheaded the campaign against the proposed Park51 Islamic community center in Manhattan; and Andrew McCarthy, who routinely warns about “creeping Shariah” in the United States and has alleged that President Obama “stands with Shariah.” Suggestions on the campaign trail by candidates that legal US residents who are Muslim be deported, that mosques be shuttered, or that Muslim neighborhoods be patrolled come directly from the writings of such bigots. They generate fear in Americans and risk destroying the nation’s cooperation with Muslim citizens and residents, which is so urgent when security challenges come to the fore. Both sides of this divide have deepened the wells of hatred. The Islamic State and its nascent Western counterpart, embodied by Donald Trump adherents in the United States and the British National Party and Danish People’s Party in Europe, are both in the process of eliminating what Islamic State propagandists term the “gray zone”— the ambit of tolerance for religious difference in open societies. In the gray zone, a girl can wear a hijab without being harassed and a young man can grow his beard. Girls go to school. Young people of both sexes socialize together. Eliminate the gray zone and young people are faced with the binary choice of zealotry or apostasy. Without the gray zone, a Christian or secular majority views every Muslim as a potential terrorist. The Inclusive America Project, and similar efforts across the United States, are struggling to maintain or restore the gray zone. Today, and for the foreseeable future, the challenge of constructive engagement of religious diversity is only growing. Moving forward, the problem needs to be viewed through both local and global lenses. At the local level, the nation needs to protect the civil liberties of its minority-religious communities and step up anti-bias and religious-literacy efforts. Some solutions must come from within the communities that are under siege. Just as the experience of discrimination led the Jewish community to create the AntiDefamation League and the gay community to create GLAAD and Lambda Legal, the American Muslim community needs to accelerate cultivation of national and community voices that can speak with legitimacy for the interests of broad segments of its members. 64

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At the global level, the United States must recognize that the Islamic State can reach out to young people in every corner of the nation, whether they are immigrant Muslims or disaffected prospective converts. The group’s interpretation of Islam must be rebutted by authoritative sources—and those rebuttals must be publicized. The world was horrified when Islamic State fanatics’ Easter attack in Lahore, Pakistan, killed dozens of Christians and Muslims with the declared goal of imposing a radical sharia regime. Yet much less attention has been given to the Marrakech Declaration, a statement earlier this year by dozens of Muslim clerics affirming that the Koran requires tolerance of religious minorities. Similarly, few know about the efforts of DC-area cleric Imam Mohammed Magid to employ culturally appropriate practices in an attempt to reverse recruitment efforts targeted at the capital’s young people. A federal judge in Minnesota has added counter-radicalization training to his sentences for youthful offenders charged in terrorism cases—another notable innovation. In the months to come, foundation funders need to make significant and meaningful commitments to identify and scale up best-practice models like these. The federal government needs to transfer responsibilities for countering violent extremism to community actors with the cultural sensitivities and legitimacy necessary for success. Local education, youth-service, publicsafety and faith-based organizations all have a role to play. One particularly critical challenge is to create interim institutions that will allow parents, teachers, and counselors to identify and dissuade young people at risk of violent acts, without turning them over to law enforcement The turmoil around religious pluralism that has tarnished the current election year is the vanguard of a new global and local matrix. Countering it will require a sustained commitment to living the constitutional birthright of religious inclusion, even when doing so is difficult. And it will require all Americans to adjust to a reality that is risky, enriching, and inevitable.

Meryl Justin Chertoff is the Executive Director of the Institute’s Justice and Society Program.

AUTHENTICITY

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Broker Associate 970.920.7399 | 970.948.6786 cell susan@masonmorse.com Aspen | 970.925.7000 www.masonmorse.com IDEAS

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HOW TO WIN THE

LATINO VOTE

Two million more Latinos will be eligible to vote in this year’s presidential election than the last. Learning to mobilize those voters could give one party the margin of victory.

ccording to a 2012 poll by my organization, Latino Decisions, only 23 percent of Latino voters supported Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. By our estimates, the presumptive 2016 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will need twice that support to win the White House. The cause for the GOP’s “Latino deficit” is no secret. It can largely be explained by two interrelated factors: Latinos are the largest growth segment of the American electorate; and just one Republican presidential candidate in the last six elections has won a majority of the popular vote—George W. Bush, who in 2004 won about 40 percent of the Latino vote. That gave the Republicans

the Southwest (Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico) in addition to Florida, which secured Bush 46 key Electoral College votes on his way to 50.7 percent of the popular vote. The pundits’ conventional wisdom that winning 38 to 40 percent of the Latino vote will be sufficient for the Republicans to carry the presidency in 2016 is wrong. The 40 percent threshold is an outdated figure: it assumes that the Bush-Kerry demographics of 2004 are still in effect, even though that election was 12 years ago. The rapid growth of the Latino electorate is too often underappreciated, and any good model must update and account for that growth. In 2004, there were 7.6 million Latino voters. In 2016, there will be more than 13 million. A 40-60 split for the GOP in 2004

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RACIAL/ETHNIC DEMOGRAPHICS OF THE AMERICAN ELECTORATE 1976 – 2016 Latino White Black Other 1976 1 89 9 1 1980 2 88 10 1 1984 3 86 10 1 1988 3 85 10 2 1992 3 87 8 2 1996 5 83 10 2 2000 7 81 10 2 2004 8 77 11 4 2008 9 74 13 4 2012 10 72 13 5 2016 11 70 12 7

resulted in an overall net advantage of 1.5 million votes for the Democratic candidate, which Bush was able to make up among nonLatinos. If the same 40-60 split were to occur in 2016, it would result in an overall net advantage of 2.6 million votes for the Democrats, given the growth in Latino voters. In 2012, when President Obama beat Romney by more than a 70-30 margin among Latinos, Obama’s victory resulted in a net advantage of 5.8 million votes just from Latinos—a hole too deep for Romney to recover among white voters, even though he won 59 percent of the white vote. Now, in 2016, we estimate that 13.1 million Latino votes will be cast; it’s possible that the Democrat might beat the Republican by a margin of 80-20 in the Latino electorate. If that happens, it would result in a net advantage of 7.9 million votes for the Democrats. Our models suggest that with fewer white voters each year and strong Democratic voting among African Americans, the Latino net vote advantage of 7.9 million would be extremely difficult for the Republican candidate to overcome. If, however, the Republican Party can make significant inroads with Latinos and win about 45 percent of the Latino vote, the Democratic advantage among Latinos would be cut down to only 1.3 million votes—and our models suggest that Republicans could win more than 50 percent of the popular vote. For the Republicans, anything below 45 percent of the Latino vote makes it very difficult to chart a path to 270 Electoral College votes or more than 50 percent of the popular vote, given the new dynamics and demographics of the American electorate in 2016. (We have laid out the full model, including a flexible and easy-to-use calculator tool on our website to allow users to make their own predictions and estimates, at latinodecisions.com/2016-calculator.) Our model assumes that the Latino electorate will continue to grow at rates observed in prior elections. Yet, as 2004 demonstrates, Latino political participation cannot be taken for granted. Many Latinos continue to feel alienated from the political process, particularly in light of the political system’s failure to deliver comprehensive immigration reform. Moreover, even in presidential elections, Latino registration and turnout lags behind population share. The need to mobilize and enlarge the Latino electorate is particularly acute for Democrats. Low turnout among Latinos, African Americans, and young voters could yield an electorate closer to 2014 than 2012. However, if Latinos are more mobilized than a simple linear projection suggests, they could very possibly exceed the 13.1 million figure. This will take targeted, sincere, and consistent outreach efforts. 68

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LATINO DEMOCRATIC ADVANTAGE IN 2016 WITH 13.1 MILLION EXPECTED VOTES D-R vote

Latino votes For Dem

Latino votes For GOP

90-10 11,790,000 1,310,000

Net Dem advantage 10,480,000

80-20 10,480,000 2,620,000 7,860,000 70-30 9,170,000 3,930,000 5,240,000 60-40 7,860,000 5,240,000 2,620,000 58-42 7,598,000 5,502,000 2,096,000 55-45 7,205,000 5,895,000 1,310,000 53-47 6,943,000 6,157,000

786,000

Nearly four years after Romney’s “self-deport” debacle, the Republican Party appears to look a lot like the party it heavily selfcritiqued in the Republican National Committee’s “Growth and Opportunity Project” report from 2013. “If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the country,” the report said, “they will not pay attention to our next sentence. If Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.” As has been evident from the results of the 2016 Republican presidential primary, immigration is indeed a litmus issue—but very much not in the way the party’s report intended it to be. An April 2016 national survey by America’s Voice and Latino Decisions found that 87 percent of Latino voters have an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Meanwhile, the 13.1 million possible Latino voters this November—two million more than in 2012—would raise the former 38 to 40 percent threshold necessary for Republicans to win to that 45 percent threshold. And that figure constantly inches up, as more than 70,000 Latinos become age-eligible voters every single month. If candidates want to mobilize and engage Latinos, they will need consistent and culturally appropriate messages that resonate. Rather than develop generic outreach and tweak it for Latinos, the most successful campaigns integrate Latinos from the start. They take the time to visit communities, speak with Latino voters, and learn the issues from their perspective. Because Latinos have historically received fewer outreach efforts, their voting history is inconsistent. Rather than write them off as “less likely” voters, campaigns can produce historic Latino turnout rates. For those who question whether outreach actually pays off look no further than the critical battleground state of Florida in 2012, which witnessed extensive efforts to woo Latino voters. The result was that Latinos had the highest voter-turnout rate among eligible voters of any racial group in the state—and provided the critical margin of victory for Obama to carry the state.

Matt A. Barreto is the co-founder of the polling and research firm Latino Decisions and professor of political science and Chicano studies at UCLA. David Damore is a senior analyst at Latino Decisions and associate professor of political ccience at UNLV.

Elevating Healthcare IN ASPEN When it comes to living healthy, Aspen Valley Hospitalâ€™s team of experts strive to deliver exceptional and compassionate medical care every day. Making sure our staff and physicians have world-class facilities, equipment and resources is a shared mission of our generous donors and Aspen Valley Hospital Foundation. Join us, as we continue to elevate healthcare in our community for generations to come.

supportaspenvalleyhospital.org Deborah Breen, President / CEO â€˘ 970-544-1302

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

FACES: TISCH AWARD Tiffany Hall, Baye Adofo-Wilson

Mercedes Ba

e Bostock

ile Roy and Mer

Darren Walker, Fred Hochberg, Bruce McEver

Adam Weinberg, Thelma Golden

Laurie Tisch

Carolyn T and Em isch Blodgett ily Tisc h Sussm an

WHO: Ford Foundation President Darren Walker was presented with the 2015 Preston Robert Tisch Award in Civic Leadership. WHAT: Walter Isaacson led a conversation with Walker before a dinner with special guests. WHERE: The Museum of Modern Art, New York City WHEN: December 8, 2015 WHY: The annual Tisch Award

service and philanthropy. 70

IDEAS

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Erin Baiano

was created in 2009 by Laurie, Jonathan and Lizzie, and Steve Tisch to honor Bob Tischâ€™s great legacy of public

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

FACES: ASPEN CHALLENGE Arne Duncan

zos Mike Be

Raj Vinnakota and Todd Babbitz

John Lewis

Jackie Bez os

WHO Governmental officials, entrepreneurs, musicians, and community activists helped to launch Aspen Challenge in Chicago, with the support of the Bezos Family Foundation. Some of the faces at the event included Arne Duncan, John Lewis, Chance the Rapper, and Mike and Jackie Bezos. WHAT: The Aspen Challenge launched in Chicago: 20 teams of high-school students were challenged to create projects that will benefit their communities. The teams with the winning projects will present them during a panel at the 2016 Aspen Ideas Festival. WHERE: Soldier Field, Chicago, Illinois WHEN: March 9, 2016 Why: Inspiring speakers at the event helped kick off the program and encouraged kids to use their creativity to improve their communities. 72

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

Dan Bayer

Chancelor Bennett (Chance the Rapper)

Focus

on the landscape.

Focus

on the ideas Aspen inspires.

Focus

on creating experiences and life long memories.

I will focus on your real estate investment.

Sarah Burggraf

Specializing in Luxury Rentals & Sales Sarah Burggraf

Broker Associate 970.875.7345 ext. 804 | 970.445.7185 cell sarahb@masonmorse.com Snowmass Village | 970.923.7700 www.masonmorse.com IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

FACES: ANNUAL AWARDS Samantha Power and Madeleine Albright

Robert K .S Paula Cro teel, Gillian Stee l, wn, Jame s Crown

l ry, Michae Joan Fab uggin D a lm e h Klein, T

Gary Lauder, Leonard Lauder

Arianna Huffington

WHO: Hundreds of our closest supporters and friends celebrated the Instituteâ€™s annual awards tradition. WHAT: The 32nd Annual Awards Dinner WHERE: The Plaza Hotel, New York City WHEN: November 12, 2015 WHY: General (ret.) Stanley McChrystal was honored with the Henry Crown Leadership Award during an engaging evening that also welcomed Ambassador Samantha Power as the featured speaker. The New York

Times columnist and author David Brooks moderated a lively conversation between McChrystal and Power, which touched on the importance of American leadership on the world stage and the value of learning from missteps. 74

IDEAS

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Clint Spaulding/Patrick McMullan Photography

Stanley McChrystal

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

INTERNATIONAL PARTNERS

IN CRITICAL DEMAND

ASPEN INSTITUTE KYIV Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko met with Institute Executive Vice President Elliot Gerson in Kyiv, Ukraine, to talk about the Institute’s newest international partner, Aspen Institute Kyiv, which launched last November. “The most important thing we need are leaders who are responsible, patriotic, and professional,” said Poroshenko, noting that Ukraine currently lacks the leaders it needs. “We are proud to bring the Aspen Institute’s values-based leadership approach to Ukraine,” said Gerson, also a Trustee of Aspen Kyiv. “There are few places in the world today where Aspen values of tolerance, good governance, and the search for common ground are more critically in demand.” Aspen Kyiv has already been providing leadership seminars for more than 300 Ukrainian participants over the past eight years with lively roundtable discussions centered on modern and ancient texts, all translated into Russian and Ukrainian. Participants have long included those now shaping Ukrainian civil society, including Hennady Zubko, Ukraine’s vice prime minister; Natalia Jaresko, former minister of finance; Olena Makeyeva, deputy minister of finance; Oleksiy Pavlenko, the country’s new minister of agriculture; and Oleg Derevianko, deputy minister of education. “We want to see this happen in Ukraine,” Gerson said, “The cultivation of our commonly shared values, improved governance, strengthened rule of law, and an effective fight against corruption.”

ASPEN INSTITUTE GERMANY In April, Aspen Institute Germany organized a Europe-wide meeting to discuss the current Syrian refugee crisis and its impacts on European solidarity and unity. With contributions from all seven Institute partners in Europe, the conference launched an Aspen Initiative for Europe by bringing together politicians, think tanks, and nongovernmental organizations to share views and experiences tackling the crisis and to look for cross-border initiatives and opportunities for further cooperation. Participants included Otto Schily, the former German interior minister; Gergely Proehle, the state secretary for European Union relations at the Hungarian foreign ministry; Pietro Benassi, the Italian ambassador; Richard Kühnel, head of the EU delegation in Germany; and several members of the German Bundestag.

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

Geoanȃ, Dassù, Solana

ASPEN INSTITUTE ESPAÑA Aspen Institute España marks its fifth anniversary this year, with more than 30 speakers participating at Institute España events, including Svetlana Alexiévich, the 2015 Nobel Prize winner in literature; Gideon Rachman, chief foreign-affairs columnist for Financial Times; and Rebeca Grynspan, Ibero-American secretary-general. In addition to its classic programs, this year, Aspen Institute España established three new programs: the Justice and Civil Society Program, the Aspen Ideas Lunch Program, and the Cervantes Program. The new Cervantes Program provides a venue to discuss the challenges of leadership in the 21st century for the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking world, using contemporary texts to stimulate debate throughout the region. In April, Aspen Institute España held a custom seminar, sponsored by International Committee Chair Clare Muñana that included participants from all ten international partners and Aspen Institute itself. The seminar began with a conversation on refugees in Europe led by Mircea Geoanȃ, Romanian parliamentarian; Marta Dassù, former Italian deputy foreign minister; and Javier Solana, former NATO secretary-general.”

Photo courtesy of Aspen Institute España

Poroshenko and Gerson

Photo courtesy of Aspen Institute Kyiv

ASPEN INSTITUTE ITALIA Organized jointly with the Centre for European Policy Studies, the European Union Institute for Security Studies, and the European External Action Service, Aspen Institute Italia launched an international energy-security workshop. The aim was to develop a global strategy for the European Union, which was officially presented by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini in June. A noteworthy highlight of the event was the panel discussion on “Energy as a Security Issue: Implications for the Transatlantic Relationship,” featuring Anthony L. Gardner, the US ambassador to the European Union; Raphael Hadas Lebel, the director of Aspen France; Christian Leffler, the deputy secretary-general for economic and global issues at the European External Action Service; Alexander Vershbow, the deputy secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; and Mariangela Zappia, the permanent representative of Italy to NATO. The event also launched the Aspen European Strategy Group, a joint European initiative of the seven European-based Aspen partners.

ASPEN INSTITUTE ROMANIA

Photo courtesy of Aspen Institute México

Aspen Institute Romania held the Bucharest Forum in late March, an initiative that works to further Romania’s longterm economic and territorial development strategies, centered on building the capacity of urban centers. The initiative aims to integrate urban management, health and sustainability, and other key projects in Bucharest and its surrounding areas to ensure a balance among the economy, urban planning, environment, finance, and cultural policy. Next steps include the launch of the Aspen City Lab platform and the further development of the Black Sea Maritime Cluster.

Fellows at Aspen Institute México

ASPEN INSTITUTE MÉXICO This March, Aspen Institute México in Guadalajara welcomed its first class of Fellows, ushering in 17 new Fellows from diverse areas of society—from entrepreneurs to commercial and industrial leaders—who all share an enthusiasm and a conviction to contribute to México’s development.

Photo courtesy of Aspen Institute Romania

Mircea Geoanȃ

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INTERNATIONAL PARTNERS

History

Respect

Leadership

Results

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ASPEN INSTITUTE PRAGUE In October 2015, Aspen Institute Prague’s annual conference, “Czech Republic: The Shape We’re In,” brought together more than 300 experts and politicians to discuss the current state and future of the country. The Czech Republic Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka and other members of the government took part in panel discussions focused on economic potential, quality of life, and national security.

Photo courtesy of Aspen Institute Ananta

970.379.2595 John@JohnSarpa.com

Ananta Aspen Centre offers seminars to the police

ANANTA ASPEN CENTRE Ananta Aspen Centre conducted its first values-based leadership program for India’s Police Service officers in February 2016. The program was the first in a series of three seminars, which will be held over the course of one year. Along with the use of Socratic dialogue, the seminars will include enactments of scenes from the Mahabharata, one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. Participants will also complete a leadership or community project of their choosing during the course of the year.

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4/27/14 7:28 PM

OUR SUPPORTERS

Courtesy of Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson

MAJOR GIFT ANNOUNCEMENTS

Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson made an exceptional

and South Korea, migration, the United Nations, climate

gift to underwrite the Great Decisions Series at the

change, and the relationship between Cuba and the

Institute. Since 2005, the Great Decisions Series has

United States. An important hallmark of this program is

served as a popular community program in Aspen,

the intergenerational discussions that take place between

engaging people in roundtable discussions around

the participants, who range in age from 25 to 90. This gift

pressing foreign-policy challenges. Edlis and Neeson’s

builds on Edlis and Neeson’s legacy of investing in projects

generosity helps secure the future of this series, which

and programs that have a direct impact on the local Aspen

is a mainstay of the Institute’s programming on the

community, while also helping the Institute provide a

Aspen Meadows campus in Aspen.

neutral commons for people to share ideas and explore

Members of the Roaring Fork Valley community

their own values. In honor of their leadership gift, the series

gathered this winter to discuss the rise of ISIS, North

has been renamed the Edlis Neeson Great Decisions Series. IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

Al and Gail Engelberg, who first joined the Aspen Institute's Society of Fellows in 1999, provided founding support for the Aspen Health Strategy Group, which Walter Isaacson launched at the 2015 Spotlight Heath/ Aspen Ideas Festival. The Health Strategy Group is composed of carefully selected health-industry leaders, business leaders, patient advocates, and other national thought leaders who have the stature and influence to drive meaningful change in US health policy. Under the auspices of the Institute's Health, Medicine and Society program, Health Strategy Group members will gather at the Institute's Aspen campus each summer, along with invited experts, to engage in an in-depth discussion on a specific health topic of critical importance. They will then issue a report intended to stimulate a national discussion on new ideas for improving the cost and quality of health care. This exceptional gift furthers Al Engelberg's longstanding professional and philanthropic commitment to making health care more affordable and accessible. The Health Strategy Group is the result of a collaboration between Engelberg and Institute leadership. Together, they created a shared vision: using the Institute's convening power to create the group and bring national attention to important health-policy questions.

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IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

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OUR SUPPORTERS

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

FACTS/PROGRAMS

Dan Bayer

SEMINARS

Seminars help participants explore the tensions among the values that form our conception of a Good Society, with the aim of deepening knowledge, broadening perspectives, and enhancing the capacity to solve the problems leaders face. Our unique, humanities-based approach to leadership development uses a variety of classic and contemporary philosophical and literary texts as the basis for intensive, interactive roundtable discussions led by skilled moderators in small groups of 15–20 participants.

THE ASPEN EXECUTIVE SEMINAR ON LEADERSHIP, VALUES, AND THE GOOD SOCIETY The Aspen Executive Seminar challenges leaders in every field to clarify the values by which they lead and to think more critically and deeply about their impact on the world in a moderated, text-based Socratic dialogue.

LEADERSHIP AND CHARACTER Leadership and Character takes up where the Aspen Executive Seminar leaves off, looking at the internal context of making leadership decisions and exploring the competing tensions that form our internal moral compass. aspeninstitute.

aspeninstitute.org/aspenseminar

October 27–30, 2016| ASPEN, CO

org/characterseminar

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

NATURE, SOCIETY, AND SUSTAINABILITY Nature, Society, and Sustainability provides both updated content and a values framework as we balance the tensions between a vibrant human social and economic ecology and environmental sustainability. aspeninstitute.org/natureseminar Facebook.com/AspenLeadership

Twitter: @AspenDialogue

John Whitney lost his son to cancer, so when he discovered a lump in his own shoulder, he was rightfully w o r r i e d . H e w a s d i a g n o s e d w i t h n o n - H o d g k i n’ s lymphoma and caught the attention of experts at the Lymphoma Immunotherapy Program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. They treated John with an individualized technique that “teaches” immune cells to attack cancer as they would bacteria or a virus. Today, John’s

tumors have shrunk and his outlook is the groundbreaking work being done at Institute, a National Cancer Institute cancer center at the Mount Sinai For you. For life.

bright, thanks to the Tisch Cancer (NCI)–designated Health System.

1- 8 0 0 - M D - S I N A I w w w.mountsinai.org

WE’RE A TEACHING HOSPITAL. OUR DOCTORS TAUGHT JOHN’S IMMUNE SYSTEM HOW TO FIGHT CANCER.

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

Dan Bayer

FACTS/PROGRAMS

ASPEN ESPAÑA SEMINAR Transatlantic Values at a Crossroads: Contemporary Leadership Challenges In collaboration with Aspen Institute España, this seminar probes the European context of modern leadership in the midst of the uncertainties in democratic capitalism, nationalism, and culture. aspeninstitute.org/espanaseminar

ASPEN ROMANIA LEADERSHIP SEMINAR In collaboration with Aspen Institute Romania, this seminar explores the specific leadership challenges facing business, government, and civil society in a post-communist environment. aspeninstitute.org/romaniaseminar JUNE 23–26, 2016 | SUSAI MOUNTAIN RESORT, ROMANIA

OCTOBER 20–23 2016 | RONDA, SPAIN

ASPEN ITALIA SEMINAR Values and Society & Leadership, Globalization, and the Quest for Common Values In collaboration with Aspen Italia, these concurrent seminars explore the cultural challenges of leadership in a European context, deepening partcipants' understandings of the values by which they lead even as those values are tested by the demands of globalization. MARCH 5–7, 2016 | CASTELVECCHIO PASCOLI, LUCCA, ITALY

WYE ACADEMIC PROGRAMS In a longstanding collaboration with the Association of American Colleges and Universities, these seminars engage faculty, senior academic administrators, and college presidents in an exchange of ideas about liberal arts education, citizenship, and the global polity. aspeninstitute.org/wyeseminars

WYE DEANS' SEMINAR JUNE 5–9, 2016 | WYE RIVER, MD

WYE FACULTY SEMINAR JULY 16–22, 2016 | WYE RIVER, MD

JUSTICE & SOCIETY SEMINAR Co-founded by the late Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, this seminar brings together people from diverse backgrounds to discuss what we mean by justice and how a just society ought to structure its legal, judicial, and political institutions. Roundtable discussions are led by two distinguished and experienced moderators: a federal or state high court judge and a professor of law or politcal theory. Contact Michael.Green@aspeninstitute.org:

CUSTOM SEMINARS Custom Seminars enable organizations and companies to develop one-day or multiday seminars relevant to their day-to-day operations. aspeninstitute.org/customseminar aspeninstitute.org/socratesseminars

aspeninstitute.org/jss

JULY 5–11, 2016 | ASPEN, CO

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT THE INDIVIDUAL PROGRAMS.

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

UPCOMING

EVENTS

JOIN

THE SOCIETY OF FELLOWS

SOF SYMPOSIUM: SOCIAL JUSTICE THROUGH THE LENS OF CONTEMPORARY ART June 19–21 | Anderson Ranch | Aspen SOF LUNCHEON: TRIAL BY THE MASSES WITH RABIA CHAUDRY July 15 | Koch Building | Aspen SOF SYMPOSIUM: DYING TO CHANGE: TRANSFORMING PALLIATIVE CARE

July 26–28 | Koch Building | Aspen

SOF FORUM: THE SCIENCE OF LEARNING WITH CAROL DWECK AND LAURENCE STEINBERG

August 16 | Koch Building | Aspen

SOF SYMPOSIUM: DANTE AND THE ORIGINS OF THE MODERN WORLD

August 23–26 | Koch Building | Aspen

*Please visit aspeninstitute.org/sof for a complete list of Society of Fellows events.

The Society of Fellows is an engaged community of supporters who actively participate in the Institute’s programs, act as advocates and ambassadors, and help sustain the Institute’s mission. For more information on joining the Society of Fellows, please contact Peter Waanders, director of the Society of Fellows, at 970.544.7912 or by email at peter.waanders@ aspeninstitute.org.

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IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

FACTS/PROGRAMS

THE SOCRATES PROGRAM The Socrates Program provides a forum for emerging leaders (ages approximately 28–45) from a wide range of professions to explore contemporary issues through expert-moderated roundtable dialogue. aspeninstitute.org/socrates

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JULY 8-11, 2016 SUMMER SEMINARS | ASPEN, CO Democracy in the Digital Age Moderator: Charlie Firestone, executive director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program

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Fighting, Competing, Imagining, Leading: The Path to a Good Society Moderator: Leigh Hafrey, senior lecturer in behavioral and policy sciences at MIT Sloan School of Management Artificial Intelligence, Business, and the Future of Work Moderator: Neil Jacobstein, co-chair of the AI and Robotics Track at Singularity University Who Is “Us” Now? Reimagining American Civic Identity Moderator: Eric Liu, director of Aspen Program on Citizenship and American Identity The Great Middle East Upheaval Moderator: Robin Wright, contributing writer for newyorker.com

OCTOBER 27-30, 2016 SOCRATES MEXICO | PUEBLA, MEXICO

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How Technology Is Affecting Our Lives, The Way We Do Business And Its Potential To Affect Social Change Moderator: Sonal Shah, Professor of practice and founding executive director, Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, Georgetown University (TBC)

DECEMBER 8-11, 2016 SOCRATES UKRAINE | KIEV, UKRAINE The Future of Privacy and Transparency: Surveillance in a Digital Age Moderator: Jeffrey Rosen, President and CEO of the National Constitution Center

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

WHAT’S POSSIBLE WHEN YOU BRING THE INTERNET TO HER DOORSTEP?

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Internet Essentials. Helping to bridge the digital divide.

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

FACTS/PROGRAMS

LEADERSHIP

Dan Bayer

THE INSTITUTE CULTIVATES ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERS AND ENCOURAGES THEM TO TACKLE THE GREAT CHALLENGES OF OUR TIMES THROUGH SOCIAL VENTURES. SPANNING VARIOUS GEOGRAPHIC AND ISSUE AREAS, WE HOST 14 DIFFERENT FELLOWSHIPS.

Fellows gather at the Resnick Action Forum.

THE ASPEN GLOBAL LEADERSHIP NETWORK Each Aspen Global Leadership Network program, inspired by the Henry Crown Fellowship Program, is developing a new generation of civically engaged men and women by encouraging them to move “from success to significance” and to apply their entrepreneurial talents to addressing the foremost challenges of their organizations, communities, and countries. Today, there are more than 2,100 Fellows in 50 countries. THE HENRY CROWN FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

THE FINANCE LEADERS FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

PAHARA-ASPEN ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERS FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION FELLOWSHIP

aspeninstitute.org/crown

aspeninstitute.org/flf

THE AFRICA LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE (ALI)

THE INDIA LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE (ILI)

HEALTH INNOVATORS FELLOWSHIP

aspeninstitute.org/ali

as.pn/ili

aspeninstitute.org/hif

THE ENVIRONMENTAL LEADERS FELLOWSHIP

aspeninstitute.org/china

pahara.org

aspeninstitute.org/catto

THE ASPEN INSTITUTE-RODEL FELLOWSHIPS IN PUBLIC LEADERSHIP

THE LIBERTY FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/liberty

aspeninstitute.org/rodel

THE MIDDLE EAST LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE (MELI)

THE CENTRAL AMERICA LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE (CALI)

aspeninstitute.org/meli

aspeninstitute.org/cali

THE CHINA FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

CENTER FOR URBAN

INNOVATION

The center bridges the gap between innovators and underserved neighborhoods, so that innovators focus more attention on community challenges and so neighborhood residents can bring their own groundbreaking ideas to life. aspeninstitute.org/policy-work/ center-urban-innovation

They transformed everything they encountered. Seniors housing was just a matter of time.

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SUMMER 2016

FACTS/PROGRAMS

Dan Bayer

POLICY

Policy programs and initiatives serve as nonpartisan forums for analysis, consensus-building, and problem-solving on a wide variety of issues.

ASCEND AT THE ASPEN INSTITUTE

CONGRESSIONAL PROGRAM

ascend.aspeninstitute.org

aspeninstitute.org/congressional

ASPEN FORUM FOR COMMUNITY SOLUTIONS aspeninstitute.org/solutions

ASPEN GLOBAL HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT aspeninstitute.org/ghd

ASPEN INSTITUTE LATINOS AND SOCIETY PROGRAM

ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/eop

EDUCATION AND SOCIETY PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/education

ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/ee

aspeninstitute.org/latinos-society

GLOBAL ALLIANCES PROGRAM

ASPEN NETWORK OF DEVELOPMENT ENTREPRENEURS aspeninstitute.org/ande

ASPEN PLANNING AND EVALUATION PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/apep

ASPEN STRATEGY GROUP aspeninstitute.org/asg

BUSINESS AND SOCIETY PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/bsp

aspeninstitute.org/global-alliances

FINANCIAL SECURITY PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/fsp

HEALTH, MEDICINE, AND SOCIETY PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/health

HOMELAND SECURITY PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/security

JUSTICE AND SOCIETY PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/justice

CENTER FOR NATIVE AMERICAN YOUTH aspeninstitute.org/cnay

PROGRAM ON PHILANTHROPY AND SOCIAL INNOVATION

CITIZENSHIP AND AMERICAN IDENTITY PROGRAM

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COLLEGE EXCELLENCE PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/college-excellence

COMMUNICATIONS AND SOCIETY PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/c&s

PROGRAM ON THE WORLD ECONOMY aspeninstitute.org/pwe

ROUNDTABLE ON COMMUNITY CHANGE aspeninstitute.org/rcc

SERVICE YEAR ALLIANCE www.aspeninstitute.org/franklin-project

COMMUNITY STRATEGIES GROUP aspeninstitute.org/csg

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

SPORTS AND SOCIETY aspeninstitute.org/sports-society

FACTS/PROGRAMS

James Harding, Lisa Monaco, Michael Fallon

ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL This weeklong, large-scale public event—co-hosted by The Atlantic—brings some of the world’s brightest minds and leaders to Aspen every summer for enlightened dialogue on the planet’s most pressing issues.

ASPEN SECURITY FORUM On the Institute’s campus in Aspen, the Aspen Security Forum convenes leaders in government, industry, media, think tanks, and academia to explore key national homeland security and counterterrorism issues.

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aspensecurityforum.org

WASHINGTON IDEAS FORUM Presented in partnership with The Atlantic, this Washington, DC–based event features leading figures in public policy discussing the most important issues of the day.

ONGOING PROGRAMS IN NEW YORK The Institute hosts a variety of programs in New York City, from book talks and benefits to roundtable discussions, forums, and the Aspen Leadership Series: Conversations with Great Leaders in Memory of Preston Robert Tisch. aspeninstitute.org/events/newyorkevents

ASPEN WORDS Throughout the year, Aspen Words encourages writers in their craft and readers in their appreciation of literature by hosting festivals, readings, and other literary exchanges. aspenwords.org

ASPEN COMMUNITY PROGRAMS The Institute offers residents of Aspen and the surrounding Roaring Fork Valley communities a variety of programs throughout the year, including speaker series, community seminars, and film screenings.

THE ASPEN INSTITUTE ARTS PROGRAM The Arts Program was established to support and invigorate the arts in America and to return the arts to the Institute’s “Great Conversation.” It brings together artists, advocates, educators, managers, foundations, and government officials to exchange ideas and develop policies that strengthen the reciprocal relationship between the arts and society.

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ONGOING PROGRAMS IN WASHINGTON, DC From September through June, the Institute’s DC headquarters hosts the Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series, featuring discussions with major recent authors. Concurrently, the Washington Ideas Roundtable Series focuses on world affairs, arts, and culture.

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Miles Willis

PUBLIC

Policy programs and initiatives serve as nonpartisan forums for analysis, consensus-building, and problem-solving on a wide variety of issues.

FACTS/PROGRAMS

POLICY PROGRAM FELLOWSHIPS Born from the policy programs at the Aspen Institute, Policy Leadership

NEW VOICES FELLOWSHIP Founded by the Institute’s Global Health and Development Program, the New Voices Fellowship cultivates compelling experts to speak on development issues.

Programs seek to empower exceptional

aspeninstitute.org/newvoices

individuals to lead with innovation in

THE ASCEND FELLOWSHIP

their chosen fields. These individuals then become more effective

Founded by the Institute’s Ascend Program, the Ascend Fellowship targets diverse pioneers paving new pathways that break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. aspeninstitute.org/ascend

change agents who can influence FIRST MOVERS FELLOWSHIP

the institutions and fields in which they work and lead to create better outcomes for society.

Founded by the Institute’s Business and Society Program, the First Movers Fellowship seeks to help the business community live up to its full potential as a vehicle for positive social change. aspeninstitute.org/firstmovers

“When “Wh en you want wisdom and insight as badly as you want to breathe, it is then you shall have it.”

ATTORNEYS AT LAW (l-r) Ann Hutchison, Michele Bass, Matt Ferguson, Kristi Ferraro, Michelle Schindler 119 S. Spring St, Ste 201 Aspen, Colorado 81611 MATTHEWFERGUSONLAW.COM 970.925.6288

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LITIGATION & TRANSACTIONS Civil | Business | Real Estate

We believe incredible change can occur when you empower people to do good. The philanthropic vision of Sam and Helen Walton has driven the work of the Walton Family Foundation for nearly three decades. Their legacy is more important than ever as we accelerate our efforts to improve K-12 education for all students in America, to protect our rivers and oceans and the communities they support, and to give back to the region that first gave Sam and Helen Walton opportunity. WaltonFamilyFdn waltonfamilyfoundation.org

FACTS/PROGRAMS

CALENDAR

For more information about any of these events, please call Natasha Little at 800.410.3463

July 9, 2016 | SOCRATES ANNUAL BENEFIT DINNER Dinner Chairs: Arjun Gupta, Peter Hirshberg, and Laura and Gary Lauder Honorees: Ann and Tom Friedman Speaker: Tom Friedman in conversation with Walter Isaacson Location: The Doerr-Hosier Center, Aspen Meadows Website: aspeninstitute.org/socratesdinner August 6, 2016 | 23RD ANNUAL SUMMER CELEBRATION Dinner Chairs: Melony and Adam Lewis Honorees: Sheri and Howard Schultz Location: The Doerr-Hosier Center, Aspen Meadows Website: aspeninstitute.org/summercelebration November 3, 2016 | 2016 ANNUAL AWARDS DINNER Dinner Chair: Mercedes T. Bass Michael Brands

Featured Speaker: Tom Brokaw Honoree: Robert K. Steel Location: The Plaza Hotel, New York City Website: aspeninstitute.org/annualdinner

2016 SUMMER SEASON

SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR

ASPEN SANTA FE BALLET

PROGRAM A

July 8 & 12 | 8:00pm

DANCE FOR KIDS!

ASPEN SANTA FE BALLET

July 9 | 4:00pm

DANCE FOR KIDS!

JUAN SIDDI FLAMENCO SANTA FE

July 21 | 4:00pm

JUAN SIDDI FLAMENCO SANTA FE

July 21 | 8:00pm

L.A. DANCE PROJECT

August 4 | 8:00pm

PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY

August 13 | 8:00pm

ASPEN SANTA FE BALLET

PROGRAM B

August 16 & 27 | 8:00pm

Tickets and information: www.aspensantafeballet.com

PHOTO: JORDAN CURET OFFICIAL SPONSORS 

FOUNDATION SPONSORS 

SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR

OFFICIAL HEALTH CLUB AND SPA OF ASPEN SANTA FE BALLET

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SUMMER 2016

GOVERNMENT SPONSORS 

Les Dames d’Aspen, Ltd.

PREFERRED HOTEL SPONSORS 

CORPORATE SPONSORS 

MEDIA SPONSORS 

Pearls of Nippon Ltd Cornavin Co. Ltd

4/19/16 1:59 PM

CONNECT WITH US ASPEN ACROSS AMERICA Executive Director of National Programs Eric L. Motley 202.736.2900 eric.motley@aspeninstitute.org SOCRATES PROGRAM INTERNATIONAL PARTNERS Vice President, Director Melissa Ingber 202.736.1077 melissa.ingber@aspeninstitute.org aspeninstitute.org/socrates aspeninstitute.org/international

THE SOCIETY OF FELLOWS Director Peter Waanders 970.544.7912 peter.waanders@aspeninstitute.org aspeninstitute.org/sof

TO CONTACT INSTITUTE LEADERS SEMINARS Director Todd Breyfogle 202.341.7803 todd.breyfogle@aspeninstitute.org aspeninstitute.org/seminars

HENRY CROWN FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM Managing Director, Henry Crown Fellowship Program Tonya Hinch 202.736.3523 tonya.hinch@aspeninstitute.org aspeninstitute.org/crown

DONATIONS, SPECIAL EVENTS, AND BENEFITS Director of Development Events and Donor Relations Leah Bitounis 202.736.2289 leah.bitounis@aspeninstitute.org

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PUBLIC PROGRAMS Vice President Aspen Ideas Festival, Director Kitty Boone 970.544.7926 kitty.boone@aspeninstitute.org aspenideas.org

Vice President, Director Jamie Miller 202.736.1075 jamie.miller@aspeninstitute.org

Willow Darsie 202.736.3545 willow.darsie@aspeninstitute.org

POLICY PROGRAMS Director of Administration, Policy and Public Programs Donna Horney 202.736.5835 donna.h@aspeninstitute.org

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aspeninstitute.org/policy-work

ASPEN GLOBAL LEADERSHIP NETWORK Dep. Director, Operations & Partnerships

ASPEN COMMUNITY PROGRAMS Director Cristal Logan 970.544.7929 cristal.logan@aspeninstitute.org

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SUMMER 2016

HERITAGE SOCIETY To learn more about planned giving opportunities, please call â€‹ Kris Robinson 202.736.3852 aspeninstitute.org/heritagesociety

MEDIA INQUIRIES Managing Director, Communications and Public Affairs Pherabe Kolb 202.736.2906 pherabe.kolb@aspeninstitute.org

OFFICES HEADQUARTERS Suite 700, One Dupont Circle, NW Washington, DC 20036-1133 202.736.5800 ASPEN CAMPUS 1000 North Third Street Aspen, CO 81611 970.925.7010 WYE RIVER CAMPUS 2010 Carmichael Road, P.O. Box 222 Queenstown, MD 21658 410.827.7168 NEW YORK OFFICES 477 Madison Avenue, Suite 730 New York, NY 10022 212.895.8000

SERIOUS MEETINGS THE NATURAL WAY With more than 1,000 acres on Maryland's Eastern Shore, privacy abounds on the grounds of two estates with state-of-the-art conference facilities, 51 distinctive accommodations, farm-to-table cuisine, striking water views and notable amenities.

FOR SERIOUS MEETINGS THE NATURAL WAY, VISIT ASPENWYERIVER.COM OR CALL 410.820.0905

water rights water planning water for food & energy transboundary & tribal water

Aspen based since 1985 www.waterlaw.com

(800) 282-5458

CONNECT WITH US

Join our friends at Facebook.com/AspenInstitute. To learn how to reach individual policy programs on Facebook, go to aspeninstitute.org/socialmedia.

Follow the Aspen Institute with @aspeninstitute. To follow individual Institute programs and directors go to Twitter.com/aspeninstitute/lists/aspen-institute.

THE INSTITUTE ONLINE E-NEWSLETTER Sign up for the Aspen Institute biweekly e-newsletter at aspeninstitute.org/newsletter.

MULTIMEDIA CHANNEL Find videos of many of the Institute’s panels and discussions, many of which are invitation-only at aspeninstitute.org/video.

IDEAS: THE MAGAZINE OF THE ASPEN INSTITUTE To find and share this issue online, go to aspeninstitute.org/aspenideamag. THE ASPEN IDEA BLOG Aspen Institute directors, experts, and guest bloggers offer insight into the work of the organization at aspeninstitute.org/blog.

PUBLICATIONS To find Institute publications, some of which are available for purchase or downloadable for free, go to aspeninstitute.org/publications.

THE ASPEN JOURNAL OF IDEAS The Institute’s digital collection of thought-provoking analyses and opinions on critical issues is at

HOW TO CONNECT WITH THE ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL To join the ongoing conversation about the Aspen Ideas Festival on Twitter, go to: Twitter.com/aspenideas or @aspenideas.

See the Institute’s people, places, and things on Instagram.com/aspeninstitute.

Join our LinkedIn Group to read more from the Institute at Linkedin.com/company/the-aspen-institute.

Watch videos of the Institute’s events and panel discussions at YouTube.com/aspeninstitute.

See what the Institute is pinning at Pinterest.com/aspeninstitute.

To download the Aspen Ideas App on Google Play or iTunes, visit as.pn/apps. To get daily updates, live feeds, videos, blog content, and more, join us all year long for today’s most innovative ideas at aspenideas.org.

To find the Institute’s photos, go to Flickr.com/aspeninstitute.

Find some of the Institute’s longer publications, including the magazine, at Scribd.com/aspeninstitute.

IDEAS

SUMMER 2016

LEGACY

WHERE THERE IS A WILL, THERE IS A WAY. WHERE THERE IS TRUST, THERE IS THE ASPEN INSTITUTE. When you name the Aspen Institute in your WILL, TRUST, OR FOUNDATION, you can: Save estate taxes

Receive the benefits of our esteemed Heritage Society

Broaden the conversation and inspire the next generation of leaders Leave a lasting impact

For more information or to advise that you have already included the Aspen Institute as a beneficiary of your will, trust, or foundation, kindly contact Irene Lukoff, Vice President of Philanthropic Partnerships, 202-736-2532 or Irene.Lukoff@aspeninstitute.org. Thank you for your enduring generosity.

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LAST PAGE

At their inaugural seminar in Aspen, each class of Henry Crown Fellows comes up with a class name—something to bond them. The 18th class of Henry Crown Fellows, the “Bones & Elephant” class, takes its name very seriously. So seriously that, at one of their class reunions in New Orleans in February, they decided to don skeleton suits designed by Fellow Wasalu Jaco (stage name Lupe Fiasco) and commandeer their own elephant-adorned float in a Mardi Gras parade.

Fellows from the class flew in from across the world, including London and Madrid, to visit New Orleans, a city that two of its members—Matt Wisdom, founder of TurboSquid, and Councilmember LaToya Cantrell—call home. Cantrell was able to secure them a float and a spot in one of the Mardi Gras parades, on top of which Fiasco performed, and the Fellows, their spouses, and Isaacson went along for the ride to ring in the parade. This diverse group of leaders welcomed the opportunity to reconnect with their like-minded peers—and toss a few beads into the crowd. “They set a new standard for reunions,” said Walter Isaacson, the Institute CEO.

Ideas: The Magazine of the Aspen Institute is published three times each year by the A spen Institute and distributed to Institute c onstituents, friends, and supporters. To receive a copy, call (202) 736-5800. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The Aspen Institute Communications Department, Ste. 700, One Dupont Circle NW, Washington, DC 20036. The opinions and statements expressed by the authors and contributors to this publication do not necessarily reflect opinions or positions of the Aspen Institute, which is a nonpartisan forum. All rights reserved. No material in this publication may be published or copied without the express written consent of the Aspen Institute. ©The Aspen Institute All Rights Reserved

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