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S U M M E R 2 0 1 5

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2 T H E A S P E N I D E A S U M M E R 2 0 1 5

CONTENTS

F E A T U R E S

54 | SEIZING HOPEMost people see the Middle East as hopelessly insecure. But most people haven’t met the Middle Eastern entrepreneurs on the vanguard of high-impact tech. Middle East Programs’ Toni Verstandig and Peter Walker Kaplan describe what happens when ten of the Middle East’s most exciting business leaders go to Silicon Valley—and what it means for the region.

60 | ART IN THE TIME OF WARIt’s easy to think of military veterans as rigorously trained, hardworking, and disciplined. And it’s easy to see art as a lawless, free-wheeling process. But when veterans combine their serious sense of purpose with the fine arts, what they produce is extraordinary. Sacha Zimmerman looks at how some Institute friends and veterans have used art to heal, to go to extremes, and to make some sense of the meaning of war.

66 | GETTING RadiCALICentral American girls often have few opportunities in life and fewer role models. That’s why the women of the Central America Leadership Initiative stepped up and built a regional mentoring program from scratch. The Aspen Global Leadership Network’s Caitlin Colegrove shows why the next generation of Central American leaders are young women.

60

72

54

84

T H E J O U R N A L O F I D E A S

72 | THE MORAL IMPERATIVES TO FOOD SECURITYThe scale of global food insecurity is unprecedented. So is the number of hungry people—and population growth is exploding. How do we feed the world? Madeleine Albright, Tom Daschle, and Dan Glickman explain what needs to happen now.

78 | BRINGING HEALTH CARE TO TRIBES THAT NEED IT

After years of poor dental care, if any, Native youth took matters into their own hands—only to find unexpected resistance. The Center for Native American Youth’s Erin Bailey explains why an innovative new program to provide oral health to remote areas, pioneered by Alaska Tribal Nation leaders, is so opposed by dental trade associations.

84 | REBUILDING LIVES, REDUCING COSTSA new financial model for employment versus incarceration has investors betting that prison reform will work. ImpactAlpha’s David Bank and Jessica Pothering demonstrate how investing in social services can be good for convicts, good for society, and good for taxpayers.

Yassine El Mansouri photographed Timothy Donley, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, as he performed for the Institute’s Arts Summit in May.

O N T H E C O V E R

S U M M E R 2 0 1 5

THE ARTOF WAR WHY DO VETERANS MAKE GREATARTISTS?

THEMIDDLEEAST IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS

AFTER FERGUSON ASPEN STARTS THE DIALOGUE

GIRLSASPEN FELLOWSLEAD IN CENTRALAMERICA

Summer2015 Cover-final.indd 1 5/26/15 10:28 AM

66

3T H E A S P E N I D E A S U M M E R 2 0 1 5The Source for Real Estate in Aspen970.925.7000 | masonmorse.com

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CONTENTS

44

10 14

38

D E P A R T M E N T S

98

30

104

10 | WHAT IS THE INSTITUTE?

14 | AROUND THE INSTITUTE

The Institute heads to San Francisco; the surgeon general hails Project Play; the Congressional Program visits the Panama Canal; the Justice and Society Program talks art crime; Alfre Woodard teaches kids to emote; and much more.

30 | LEADING VOICES

NPR’s Michel Martin discusses law enforcement, Ferguson, and race with police officers and a youth activist in St. Louis; LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner talks economic opportunity for the whole world; and Harvard’s Robert Putnam makes the case for investing in other people’s children.

38 | IMPACT

New Voices Fellows take on child malnourishment in Africa; writer Alexandra Oliva explains how Aspen Words made her first novel possible; the Global Health and Development program partners with artisan women in Kandahar; and the Education and Society Program empowers teachers across America.

98 | INTERNATIONAL PARTNERS

Bill Clinton visits Aspen Institute México; the Ananta Aspen Centre reviews President Obama’s recent visit to India; the Aspen Romania Leadership Awards and Gala Dinner celebrates young leaders; and much more.

122 | OUR SUPPORTERS

Jim and Mary Anne Rogers launch a new fellowship; Laurie M. Tisch and the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund create Institute scholarships; Merilee and Roy Bostock and Ilona Nemeth and Alan Quasha bring the Society of Fellows to New York; the Ricardo Salinas Foundation and Woody Hunt and the Hunt Family Foundation make Latino voices an Institute priority; and more.

104 | FACTS

Get to know the Institute’s programs.

127 | CONNECT WITH US

Contact our program directors; get in touch on social media.

128 | THE LAST WORD

For Aspen Global Leadership Fellow Christopher Michel, art and adventure are all in a day’s work.


© Jo

hn D

olan M A J A D U B R U L

325 East Hopkins, Aspen | www.majadubrul.com J E W E L R Y

How Will You Shape the

How Will You Shape the

How Will You Future?

Shape theFuture?

Shape the

Institute.indd 1 4/18/15 2:38:08 PM



CONTENTS

6

THE INSTITUTE’S DIGITAL HIGHLIGHTS

@ASPENINSTITUTE

The cost of food waste? About $1 trillion.

@ASPENINSTITUTE

All the barriers that used to keep us apart now look a lot more like nets than walls. —@billclinton at @AspenMexico

Neuroscience and Mindfulness with Goldie Hawn At a Murdock Mind, Body, Spirit Series event, Goldie Hawn speaks about her

groundbreaking MindUP program, the result of ten years of collaboration with

neuroscientists, educators, psychologists, and experts in the field of mindful-

awareness training. youtube.com/mindfulgoldie

The Future of the World Bank with Jim Yong KimWorld Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim on the “The Bank’s Agenda:

Transforming Development.” youtube.com/jimyongkim

Public-Health Grand Rounds with Tom Frieden Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lectures

on “Ebola and Beyond: Protecting Americans and the World from Disease Threats.”

youtube.com/roundswithfrieden

Beyond the pages of The Aspen Idea magazine, the Institute features news, blogs, video, audio, and social-media content every day. Here is a sample of what you can find online.

WHAT'S ON TWITTER?

3 Significant Results From Obama’s Visit to India Obama’s

recent visit to India highlighted

three opportunities for the two

nations: combating climate change,

implementing a nuclear agreement,

and strengthening trade.

aspeninstitute.org/obamainindia

Why Make Room in Sports for Kids with Developmental Disabilities Every kid deserves to

feel like they belong somewhere. Sports

are uniquely capable of providing that

feeling for kids regardless of their

challenges. aspeninstitute.org/blog/sports-inclusion

THE ASPEN JOURNAL OF IDEAS

America, Torture, and our Foreign PolicyIn the aftermath of the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee

“torture report,” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius and New York Times

Washington correspondent David Sanger discuss its shortcomings and how it

will affect US foreign policy. aspen.us/journal/tortureandmerica

FACEBOOK“As a nation, there is so much that we

could be doing to improve the eating

habits of America, especially with how

we are feeding our youth.” —chef and

restauranteur José Andrés on why healthy food is so important, at the Aspen Challenge in Washington, DC.

PINTERESTCheck out our photos and pin

favorites to your board! Moments

captured include onstage

conversations with noteworthy

speakers, backstage moments at

the Aspen Ideas Festival, and

shots from the Institute archives.

INSTAGRAMA look behind the curtain—from

office happenings to prepping

the stage for a big event—on our

Instagram account.

THE ASPEN IDEABLOG


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Walter IsaacsonPresident and Chief Executive Officer

Elliot F. GersonExecutive Vice President,

Policy and Public Programs; International Partners

Amy Margerum BergExecutive Vice President,

Development and Operations; Corporate Secretary

Peter ReilingExecutive Vice President,

Leadership and Seminar Programs;Executive Director, Henry Crown Fellowship Program

Cindy BuniskiVice President,

Administration; Executive Director, Aspen Wye Campus

Dolores Gorgone Vice President,

Finance and Information Technology; Chief Financial Officer

James M. SpiegelmanVice President,

Chief External Affairs Officer; Deputy to the President

BOARD OF TRUSTEES CHAIRMAN: Robert K. Steel BOARD OF TRUSTEES VICE 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, Stephen L. Carter, Cesar Conde, Katie Couric, Andrea Cunningham, Kenneth L. Davis, John Doerr, Thelma Duggin, Michael D.

Eisner, L. Brooks Entwistle, Alan Fletcher, Corinne Flick, Henrietta Holsman Fore, Ann B. Friedman, Juan Ramón de la Fuente, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Mircea Geoana, David Gergen, Gerald Greenwald, Patrick W. Gross, Arjun Gupta, Jane Harman, Hayne Hipp, Mark Hoplamazian, Gerald D. Hosier, Ann Frasher Hudson, Robert J. Hurst, Salman Khan, Teisuke Kitayama, Michael Klein, David H. Koch, Laura Lauder, Yo-Yo Ma, Frederic V. Malek,

James M. Manyika, William E. Mayer*, Bonnie Palmer 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, Margot L. Pritzker,

Peter A. Reiling, Lynda Resnick, Condoleezza Rice, James Rogers, Ricardo Salinas, Isaac O. Shongwe, Anna Deavere Smith, Michelle Smith, Javier Solana, Shashi Tharoor**, Laurie Tisch, Giulio Tremonti, Roderick K. von Lipsey, Vin Weber, Michael Zantovsky

*Chairman Emeritus **On Leave of Absence

LIFETIME TRUSTEES CO-CHAIRMEN: Berl Bernhard*, James C. Calaway

LIFETIME TRUSTEES: Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Keith Berwick, John Brademas, Melva Bucksbaum, William T. Coleman, Jr., Lester Crown, William H. Donaldson, Sylvia A. Earle, James L. Ferguson, Richard N. Gardner, Alma L. Gildenhorn, Jacqueline Grapin,

Irvine O. Hockaday Jr., Nina Rodale Houghton, Jérôme Huret, William N. Joy, Henry A. Kissinger, Yotaro Kobayashi, Ann Korologos*, 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 Idea is published twice a year by the Aspen Institute and distributed to Institute constituents, friends, and supporters.

To receive a copy, call (202) 736-5850. 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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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,

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Corby Kummer

MANAGING EDITOR Eric Christensen

EXECUTIVE EDITOR Sacha Zimmerman

EDITOR EMERITUS Jamie Miller

PUBLISHER Jennifer Myers

SENIOR EDITORS Jean Morra, Tarek Rizk

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Caitlin Colegrove

ASSISTANT EDITORS Mary Cappabianca, Keosha Varela

DESIGN DIRECTOR Katie Kissane

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Paul Viola

ART DIRECTOR Lorie D'Alessio

CONTACT EDITORIAL [email protected]

ADVERTISING Cynthia Cameron, 970.544.3453,

[email protected]

GENERAL The Aspen Institute,One Dupont Circle NW, Suite 700, Washington, DC 20036

202.736.5800, www.aspeninstitute.org

Coldwell Banker Mason Morse Real Estate 514 East Hyman Avenue • Aspen

[email protected] www.carriewells.com

Carrie Wells • 970.948.6750

to create a better place to live.

A great realtor does much the same.

Great leaders strive

VISION, INNOVATION, LONGEVITY.

Those are a few of the qualities of a

great resort. Likewise, a great Realtor.

Which probably explains why Carrie

Wells is consistently in the Top 10 in

the world for Coldwell Banker and

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interested in Aspen, give Carrie a call.

She’s dedicated to creating a space

where your spirit can flourish.

Carrie Wells

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10

WHAT IS THE ASPEN INSTITUTE?

T H E A S P E N I D E A S U M M E R 2 0 1 5

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 Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It also maintains offices in New York City and has an international network of partners.

Dan

iel B

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© 2015 Raytheon Company. All rights reserved. “Customer Success Is Our Mission” is a registered trademark of Raytheon Company.

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MISSION: MISSION: A WORLD OF INNOVATIONFOR OVER 90 YEARS, RAYTHEON HAS ENABLED COUNTLESS MISSIONS BY REMAINING COMMITTED TO A SINGLE ONE: CUSTOMER SUCCESS. FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE OCEAN TO THE FARTHEST REACHES OF SPACE, FROM REMOTE BATTLEFIELDS TO THE VIRTUAL REALMS OF CYBERSPACE, RAYTHEON TECHNOLOGIES ARE DEPLOYED IN MORE THAN 80 COUNTRIES TO DELIVER INNOVATION IN ALL DOMAINS.


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AROUND THE INSTITUTEThe Latino Edge Latinos are America’s largest minority group at 54 million people, or 17 percent of the population. By 2060, those numbers are expected to more than double. That means Latinos are intrinsically linked to America’s future. Yet Latino issues and representation lag in public discourse—and in halls of power. This seismic shift is a net positive: More and more, young people are needed to fill jobs and contribute to an aging population. That’s why the Institute’s Latinos and Society Program is dedicated to improving Latinos’ educational and workforce opportunities. After all, by 2044, the United States will be a majority minority country. aspeninstitute.org/latinos-society

Latinos are on track to account for 40% of US job growth by 2020.

20.4%

64.8%

Latinos are 20.4% of all new entrepreneurs.

20.2% 43%

Latino businesses surged to 3.22 million in 2014, a 43% growth

since 2007, compared with 20.2% growth

in the same period for all US businesses.All US Businesses

Latino Businesses

5 states with the fastest-growing

Latino populations? • Alabama • Tennessee • South Carolina • Kentucky • South Dakota

64.8% of Latinos living in the United States are native-born.

BORN IN THE US

The $1.2 trillion Latino consumer market in the United States is larger than the entire economies of all but 13 countries in the world.Sources: Geoscape; US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce; Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project; US Census; University of Georgia, Selig Center, Multicultural Economic Study; The Wall Street Journal, February 2015.

• 6 bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms, 4.47 acres, 8,963 sq ft• Inviting landscape with lush gardens, water features• Walk and ski out your back door on open space trails• Close to schools, Aspen core, Aspen Institute and Music Festival• Marvelous views of two ski areas – Aspen Highlands and Tiehack

$16,950,000furnished

www.penneycarruth.com

Penney Evans Carruth970.379.9133 [email protected]

Secret. Secluded. Sophisticated.

A private hideaway with grand views, yet so close to all of Aspen.

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LATINO

POPULATION

ON THE R

ISE


AROUND THE INSTITUTE

Most people don’t think of the arts as a solution to the critical

issues of the world. But politics and art are deeply entwined.

That’s something contemporary artist, activist, and onetime

political prisoner Ai Weiwei knows firsthand. “Freedom of

speech is essential to creativity,” Weiwei told the audience at

the Institute’s new Arts Summit via video from Beijing. The first

annual Kennedy Center/Aspen Institute Arts Summit brought

together some of the nation’s brightest leaders in art, educa-

tion, law, technology, music, and entertainment for a series of

candid discussions about how the arts can address societal

issues. Afghanistan veteran Timothy Donley, who sang for the

summit audience, found freedom in song after losing his legs

in war. The intimate connection of freedom and creativity is a

concept as old as the United States itself. “The Founding Fa-

thers viewed the arts as an essential part of one’s DNA,” David Rubenstein, co-CEO of the Carlyle Group, told the crowd.

Directed by Arts Program Director Damian Woetzel and

Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter, the summit

embraced that vital, intrinsic, even genetic feeling as well as

the mission of the Kennedy Center itself, which tries to fulfill

John F. Kennedy’s vision of the arts making a “contribution

to the human spirit.” To that end, the program examined race,

education, technology, and free speech—envisioning a road

forward for the arts in each discipline. Among other topics,

the two-day event featured a hypothetical debate—should a

city sell its art to pay its pensioners?—that started a thought-

ful argument among Ford Foundation President Darren Walker, Bloomberg Associates Principal Kate Levin, “House

of Cards” show-runner Beau Willimon, and Harvard Univer-

sity Professor Michael Sandel. US Chief Technology Officer

Megan Smith made a case for eradicating silos of informa-

ART WILL CHANGE THE WORLD

“THE FOUNDING FATHERS VIEWED THE ARTS AS AN ESSENTIAL PART OF ONE’S DNA.” —David Rubenstein

Yass

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sou

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Sotomayor

Rubenstein

Institute CEO Walter Isaacson and Smith


tion as well as the arbitrary lines we draw between fields of

study. “The more we think of things as divided, the more we

limit what’s possible,” she said. US Supreme Court Justice

Sonia Sotomayor agreed: “Art is meant to challenge us to

think outside our norms.” Sotomayor also noted that the law,

like art, “is gray, not black-and-white.”

Filmmaker Spike Lee addressed controversy in the arts:

“Art is not a popularity contest,” he said. In fact, there is great

power in being provocative, the author and art historian Sarah Lewis agreed, asking, “How many movements have begun

with one work of art?” Provocation is certainly a topic close to

Ai Weiwei’s heart, as he tries to create social change through

art—exactly what art is meant for, he thinks.

Alan Kay, the personal-computing luminary, perfectly cap-

tured the sentiment: “The best way to predict the future is to

invent it.” aspeninstitute.org/arts-summit

“FREEDOM OF SPEECH IS ESSENTIAL TO CREATIVITY.”

—Ai Weiwei

Yass

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Weiwei

LewisKay

Institute CEO Walter Isaacson and Smith

Lee



IDEAS TO GO

Want to hear civil-rights

pioneer John Lewis describe

the 1965 march in Selma?

How about astrophysicist

Janna Levin on the Big

Bang? Or maybe you’d like

to soul-search with Wild’s

Cheryl Strayed on a hike?

They’re all in one place: Aspen

Ideas To Go—the Institute’s

first podcast. Launched in

February with a grant from

the Innovation Fund, Aspen

Ideas To Go airs weekly and

features dynamic experts

sharing their knowledge

on, well, everything—from

nanotechnology to the outer

reaches of the universe.

Whether you’re into arts,

politics, business, science,

technology, or health, Aspen

Ideas To Go has you covered.

Subscribers can listen to

talks from Institute events—

like the Aspen Ideas Festival,

the Alma and Joseph

Gildenhorn Book Series, and

Aspen Words—anywhere,

anytime. So if you can’t

come to Aspen, let Aspen

come to you—you’re only

a smartphone, tablet, or

computer away. Find Aspen

Ideas To Go on iTunes.

as.pn/togo

COLLEGE WITHOUT WALLSOn April 15, the Institute’s Franklin Project, the National Conference on Citizenship, and the

Corporation for National and Community Service hosted the “Service Year + Higher Ed

Innovation Challenge.” US Colleges and universities competed to create new education-

affiliated service-year positions. Higher education already has a long tradition of great

opportunities—service-learning, work-study, summers of service, gap years for service,

and more—but this new challenge, with grant support from the Lumina Foundation, aimed

to spark innovation and explore the best ideas for how a service year can link to learning,

translate into course credit, help students find their callings—and increase their likelihoods of

finishing college. Prizes were awarded in three categories: private university, public university,

and community college, with each winner receiving $30,000. The winners were Drake

University, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Miami Dade College. Miami Dade

received an additional $10,000 for the audience choice award. sychallenge.org

Climary Sanchez performs her poetry

at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen.

Dan

Bayer

“YOUR VOICE MATTERS”For the third year, Aspen Words brought acclaimed bilingual teaching artists—Myrlin

Hepworth, Logan Phillips, and Mercedez Holtry—from Arizona and New Mexico to Colorado

to work with Roaring Fork Valley middle and high school students. The trio visited 16 schools,

reaching more than 3,000 young people. Students shared personal stories through spoken-

word poetry and learned to respect each others’ voices. Hepworth began one exercise by

declaring: “What you have to say is important.” He recalled a girl from a previous workshop

who wrote a poem about her father’s death that moved an entire classroom to tears—“every

single ounce of her spirit vibrated through her voice.” Hepworth added, “What happened in

that moment as that little girl read her poem is she brought us into her world. It humanized

her. And another girl who was there, whose father is absent, needed to hear that she wasn’t

alone in that absence. Your voice matters.” As Hepworth spoke, a hush fell over the room.

When he finished, 30 students picked up their pencils and went to work on their own poems.

aspenwords.org


CORE STRENGTHIn November, the Institute’s Education and Society Program

launched CoreReadySchools.org, a web-based tool designed to

help schools strengthen implementation of the Common Core

State Standards or the college- and career-ready standards in

their state. Core Ready Schools enables teachers and principals

to assess, plan, and measure improvement efforts over multiple

years. This tool assists schools as they make strategic decisions

about professional learning and instructional improvement

and provides links to curated resources designed to accelerate

implementation efforts. The response from education watchers

has been tremendous. Core Ready Schools is currently being

used across the Hillsborough County Public Schools and Los

Angeles Unified School District (approximately 1,350 schools

combined across both regions). According to Lynn Dougherty-

Underwood, Hillsborough’s director of literacy, “Core Ready

Schools is providing our teachers and school principals with a

method … to identify school-wide gaps [and] make immediate

decisions to address the gaps.” Plans are under way to embed

Core Ready Schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Newark

Public Schools, and Long Beach Unified School District.

aspeninstitute.org/education

TWO NEW ASPEN SERIES HEAD WEST“Nobody is born smart. We all start at zero.” That’s a motto

Khan Academy founder and Institute Trustee Salman Khan

promotes when talking about education and technology.

Khan spoke at the new Morris Series in San Francisco—the

ideal high-tech, innovative city for the Institute’s programming

and expanding community. In fact, San Francisco has inspired

two new events series: the Morris Series and the Society

of Fellows Discussion Receptions. The Morris Series hosts

conversations about innovation, technology, and leadership,

and is made possible with the support of Institute Trustee

Diane L. Morris. In addition to Khan, the series has featured

IDEO founder David Kelley on human-centered design,

Stanford University Chief Scientist Andrew Ng on artificial

intelligence, and a panel on Middle Eastern entrepreneurship

with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and

Silicon Badia’s Emile Cubeisy. The Society of Fellows

Discussion Receptions are intimate gatherings held across

the Bay area and featuring prominent experts in private homes. Underwritten by Bonnie and Tom McCloskey and by Devon

and Michael Karpowicz, the receptions have to date hosted filmmaker Ken Burns on the American character and Stanford’s

Tom Byers on high-growth innovation. As the Institute continues to expand in the San Francisco Bay Area, join the Society of

Fellows for access to premier leaders, experts, and Institute events, both in San Francisco and across the country.

aspeninstitute.org/society-fellows

Khan with Institute Trustee John Doerr

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“Core Ready Schools is providing our teachers and school principals with a method … to identify school-wide gaps [and] make immediate decisions to address the gaps.”



SOCRATES COMES TO KIEVFor the first time, the Institute’s Socrates Program worked

in cooperation with the Aspen Ukraine Initiative to bring

a seminar to Kiev, Ukraine, for 21 emerging leaders from

seven countries. Leigh Hafrey moderated “Heroes and

Villains: Leading Business, Politics, and Civil Society in the

21st Century” on the topic of leadership across business,

government, and civil society. Meeting in April in the

Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine, the group used the backdrop

of Kiev, with its centuries-old history and vibrant culture, as a

launching point for rich discussions of the many challenges

of leadership and the complex governance challenges

faced in Ukraine today. One participant summarized his

experience: “Set against the crisis in Ukraine, this was the

perfect setting to debate, explore, and sharpen our values,

and to realize that we ourselves are responsible for a better

future.” aspeninstitute.org/socrates

CONGRESS ON THE CANALThe Institute’s Congressional Program hosted its 123rd

conference for members of Congress this year in Panama

City. A bipartisan delegation learned from luminaries such as

former World Bank President Bob Zoellick and Nobel Prize–

nominee Claudia Paz y Paz, among others. The delegation

toured the new locks under construction at the Panama

Canal, as well as the century-old operating locks. When the

new locks open next year, the capacity of the canal will more

than double—with significant implications for US business

and ports. Given the US government’s role in dredging

ports to accommodate the larger ships that will start

traversing the canal, the visit demonstrated the importance

of understanding how international and domestic policy

merge. The group also tackled drug policy, immigration, and

democratic governance. aspeninstitute.org/congressional

Above: Republican Representative Gregg Harper of Mississippi, Democratic Representative John Garamendi of California, and Republican Representative Andy Harris of Maryland in front of a container ship passing through the Miraflores lock of the Panama Canal.

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INVEST FOR THE BESTIn partnership with the Georgetown University McDonough School of Business, the Institute’s Ascend program conducted a survey of active and emerging players in US impact investing. Ascend works to move children and their parents to educational success and economic security; as such, the group focused its survey on investments in education, economic assets, and health—three of the most powerful levers for breaking the cycle of poverty. Survey respondents include foundations, boutique investment funds, private financial institutions, private wealth managers, and institutional consultants. See story on page 84. ascend.aspeninstitute.org

AMONG IMPACT INVESTORS SURVEYED:

69%invest in areas that support low-income families and those most in need.

80% have portfolios that meet or exceed established financial metrics.

90% meet or exceed social metrics.

$2.85 billion

Together they have committed $2.85 billion in impact investment capital in the United States.

Ukraine Socrates participants

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SPIRIT OF THE LAWThe new Justice Circle, co-chaired by attorneys Steve Susman

and Tristan Duncan, launched last year with events in New

York, Los Angeles, Washington, and Chicago. At the New

York headquarters of Christie’s, Justice Circle supporters and

friends of the Justice and Society Program listened as New

York Times reporter Patricia Cohen quizzed experts on the

restitution of artworks looted by the Nazis. Illustrating her

presentation: a work by Egon Schiele about to be auctioned

after novel mediation efforts by the gallery. In a Chicago

restaurant, political philosopher and author Martha Nussbaum

International Director of

Restitution at Christie’s

Monica Dugot with an

original Egon Schiele

guided participants through an exploration of the challenges of

religious inclusion in an era of fear. This year, says JSP Executive

Director Meryl Chertoff, Justice Circle members will hear from

judges, prosecutors, and civil rights advocates at the front

lines of legal change. “The programming is thought-provoking,

and I feel good that my dollars help bring Aspen scholarship

participants to JSP’s summer seminar,” Duncan says.

To learn more or join the Justice Circle, contact Kris Robinson

at 202-701-3252 or [email protected].

aspeninstitute.org/justice

HISTORY OF A PLAGUEThe first volume of Pulitzer Prize–winner Larry Kramer’s magnum opus on the US history of

AIDS, The American People, was published in April. Decades in the making, the release was

followed in June by an HBO documentary about Kramer’s life and work. Kramer joined Arts

Program Director Damian Woetzel at Roosevelt House this spring to discuss his writing—

from the novel that made him notorious, Faggots, to his most famous work, The Normal

Heart. A celebrated public-health and gay-rights advocate, Kramer co-founded the Gay Men’s

Health Crisis in 1982 and ACT UP in 1987. With public demonstrations and the indelible slogan

“Silence=Death,” ACT UP protested the FDA’s plodding steps in bringing AZT to market and is

credited with motivating the agency to get the drug out faster. Kramer’s contributions to gay

rights and American letters are matched only by his reputation for irascibility. But as Kramer

said to Woetzel, “Don’t pay attention to what people say about you, whether it’s good or bad.

It just gets in the way of the work.” aspeninstitute.org/arts

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“Is it better to be feared or loved?” This enduring question—first posed

by Niccolò Machiavelli in the 16th century—launched the Henry Crown

Fellowship Program’s first worldwide Jeffersonian dinner. Inspired by the

salons held at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the dinners bring leaders

together to debate issues of the day in an intimate setting. The February

event united more than 150 program fellows, mentors, and moderators at

18 dinners, across 13 cities, spanning two continents. Starting in London

and concluding in Los Angeles, the dinner used social media to propel the

conversation westward and weave participants together across time zones.

Fellows from across classes collided in new ways, and the question stirred

vigorous debate. Some argued, “Fear is the only stimulus that works,” while

others maintained, “My anchor is being loved.” Either way, the evening

connected Henry Crown leaders with the ideas and spirit of the Fellowship

itself. These dinners will become a biannual Fellowship event, with the next

one planned for this fall under the rebranded name the “Henry Crown Food

for Thought Dinner Series.” aspeninstitute.org/crown

DINNER WITH MACHIAVELLI

Jeffersonian dinner participants Shane Tedjarati, Tamsin

Smith, Skip Battle, Emily Scott Pottruck, and David Mills

at the home of Anne Devereux-Mills and her husband,

David, in San Francisco

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HEALTH OF A NATIONThe Institute’s Aspen Global Leadership Network is launching its newest fellowship program,

the Health Innovators Fellowship, focused on leaders in US health care. The program—a

partnership with the Greenville Health System, South Carolina’s largest not-for-profit health

care system and an advocate for healthy-living initiatives—will be led by Rima Cohen, former

director of health and social services for New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former

health-policy counselor to the US Health and Human Services secretary. The fellowship’s goal

is to strengthen health care innovators’ leadership and connect, inspire, and challenge them

to develop creative approaches to improve Americans’ health and well-being. Fellows will

represent a range of professions—including health care practitioners, policymakers, device

manufacturers, insurers, tech entrepreneurs, and nonprofits. The Greenville Health System has

pledged an extraordinary $4.3 million to underwrite the first three classes of 20 Fellows each.

The first class starts in November. aspeninstitute.org/hifThe Mount Sinai tent at the Aspen

Ideas Festival’s Spotlight Health

PUT MONEY ON HER“Lower-income households can and will save if given the right

opportunities,” consumer-finance expert Ida Rademacher

told American Public Media’s “Marketplace” last September.

Just a few months later, in January, the Institute’s Initiative on

Financial Security appointed Rademacher as its new executive

director. Rademacher—formerly of the Corporation for

Enterprise Development—will lead the initiative as it explores

the most critical financial challenges facing households across

the country as well as the ways that financial insecurity and

wealth inequality can undermine efforts to build a resilient

US economy. In classic Institute tradition, the program will

use high-level dialogue and public events to move beyond

diagnosis and put financial security at the national forefront.

A rapidly evolving financial system requires public policies

that can improve the financial security and well-being of all

Americans. The program’s new strategy will be announced at

the fourth annual Financial Security Summit in Aspen this July.

aspeninstitute.org/financial-security Rademacher


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A SPORTING CHANCEBy Tom Farrey

Murthy Indi Cowie kicking it in the capital.

For too long, sport has existed largely as a subset of the

entertainment industry. We all love a good game. We

marvel at moments of brilliance by great athletes—those

vivid, physical, occasionally breathtaking expressions of the

capacity of the human spirit. But the fostering of individual

and public health has not been a chief priority of the sport

system, from the elite to grassroots levels. Huge investments

have been made in community recreation, and every parent

wants sport to promote positive health outcomes in their

child, but the sport system is largely organized around

the principle of identifying the next generation of athlete-

entertainers. Today, only four out of ten kids ages six to 12

play team sports on a regular basis.

The health sector, meanwhile, has largely stayed on the

sidelines. Many leading nations have a sports ministry or

similar body to encourage sport development for the sake

of public health. Not the United States: the closest thing we

have is the US Olympic Committee, which in 1978 was given

an unfunded mandate to coordinate amateur sports activity.

Researchers will tell you the best way to kill your grant

application with the National Institutes of Health is to include

the word “sports” in your proposal. That’s starting to change

with the concerns around concussion, but sport activity still

can be seen as frivolous.

At the Project Play Summit in Washington, the

culmination of two years of work by the Institute’s Sports and

Society program, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy connected

the dots—tying access to sport to the health of the nation.

“Sports can be seen as a privilege, or a luxury,” Murthy said

in his keynote. “But for me and for many children who grow

up in America, sports isn’t just that. It’s a necessity. It can be

a key to better health. It can [provide] a foundation that can

lead to better scholastic achievement and more success later

in life.” No surgeon general has ever spoken so directly—or

personally—about the role of youth sports in promoting

health.

The 350 leaders who came to the summit—one of the

largest one-day events in the Institute’s history—explored

Sports and Society’s 48-page report, “Sport for All, Play for

Life: A Playbook to Get Every Kid in the Game,” which offers

eight strategies for the eight sectors that touch the lives of

children. Murthy called the report “a very powerful roadmap”

to get all children in all communities active through sports.

Over the next year, the Sports and Society Program will

present Project Play at national gatherings of key groups

that can catalyze systems change.

But many groups aren’t waiting for us to show up. In

fact, between the surgeon general’s talk and the end of the

Summit, 17 organizations announced new commitments

to action that were specific, meaningful, and coordinated

with the strategies in the report. Those organizations

included Major League Baseball, the NCAA, US Lacrosse,

the US Tennis Association, Nike, the Robert Wood Johnson

Foundation, Whistle Sports, the Laureus Sport for Good

Foundation, the software firm LeagueApps, and the Joint

Commission on Sports Medicine & Science.

The Project Play Summit was the day that sport and

health leaders found a common sun to orbit.

Tom Farrey is executive director of the Institute’s Sports and Society Program. He can be reached at [email protected] or followed @TomFarrey.



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BEING BELAFONTE “Much of what we know

about the human existence

has really been what artists

have left for us to rummage

through,” says Harry

Belafonte. Few artists have

had as significant an impact

on both culture and politics

as the singer, actor, and

activist. The Grammy, Emmy,

and Tony Award–winner

was the featured guest at

the inaugural public event

for the Arts Program’s new

initiative, Race, Arts, and

America. From introducing

America to calypso music to

conceiving of “We Are the

World,” Belafonte has long

been a force in the music

industry. But he is also known

for his tireless efforts during

the civil rights era and his

close association with Martin

Luther King, Jr. Belafonte

joined the Institute’s Arts

Program at Lincoln Center

for a conversation about

the power of the arts to

influence race, human rights,

diplomacy, and politics. “I

take advantage of these

forums,” he said, “just in case

there’s something someone

needed to hear and I was

the embodiment of that

information.”

aspeninstitute.org/arts

LANGUAGE ARTS“There are a lot of things I don’t comprehend until I’ve written something about them,” Jess

Walter, best-selling author of Beautiful Ruins, said at the launch of the Aspen Words 2015 Winter

Words series, which brought five acclaimed authors to Colorado to offer unique perspectives

on writing. Former US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winner Natasha Trethewey read from

her latest book, Thrall, and said, “[I am] a poet interested not only in the sounds of language and

in its beauty, but in its ability

to help us deal with our

most difficult knowledge.”

New Yorker staff writer

George Packer discussed

his journalism career and his

book The Unwinding, which

won the 2013 National Book

Award: “When I wrote The

Unwinding, it was out of a

sense of anger and … a real

sense of affection for my

country.” Best-seller Michael

Lewis (Flash Boys, The Blind

Side, Moneyball) described

his all-too-human subjects:

“They’re al l disruptive.

They’re all in some argument

with the world around them.”

Finally, in April, Ruth Ozeki

talked about her latest novel,

A Tale for the Time Being.

“The book is very much

about the physicality of

books, the enduring nature

of matter.” aspenwords.org

TAKING YOUTH ISSUES TO THE WHITE HOUSEThe Aspen Forum for

Community Solutions’

Monique Miles was invited to

the White House in February

to moderate a panel at

the My Brother’s Keeper

Community Challenge

National Convening, an

effort President Obama

launched to “ensure that all

youth, including boys and

young men of color, have

opportunities to improve their life outcomes and overcome barriers to success.” That’s also

why the Aspen Forum started the Opportunity Youth Incentive Fund: to improve opportunities

for the millions of young people who are out of school and out of work. Youth voices are vital,

and the fund focuses on creating education and career options with an emphasis on youth

perspectives to disrupt cycles of poverty. The White House discussions featured reflections on

personal development, Native American students’ cultural identity, and community-organizing

strategies that rebuild relationships between boys and men of color and law enforcement.

aspencommunitysolutions.org

Miles (far left) with the My Brother’s Keeper panel at the White House

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THE MERIDIAN TRIO AT WYEThe Aspen Wye Fellows hosted a spring concert at

the Institute’s Wye River campus in Maryland, bringing

together three elite, talented young musicians from Russia

and South Africa. Margarita Loukachkina on piano, Nikita

Borisevich on violin, and Jacques-Pierre Malan on cello

delighted the audience with performances of Beethoven’s

Piano Trio in D major, Op. 70 #2 (“Ghost”) and Brahms’s

Piano Trio in C major, Op. 87. Currently studying at

Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory of Music, the musicians

were selected to be members of an honors ensemble,

the Meridian Trio. They have received awards around the

world and played on renowned stages—Washington’s

Kennedy Center, Johannesburg’s Linder Auditorium, and

the Moscow Conservatory’s Great Hall. “We were delighted

to bring these three outstanding international musicians

to the Wye River campus,” Philip J. Webster, Aspen Wye

Fellows founder and chairman, said. “Music has been

an important part of Wye Fellows since we began the

program.” aspeninstitute.org/aspenwyefellows

In January, the Institute’s Arts Program hosted its latest

ArtStrike in Washington, featuring Lil Buck and Alfre Woodard, the 2014 Harman-Eisner artists in residence.

Created by Damian Woetzel and Yo-Yo Ma, ArtStrike

lets top artists step off the stages in the communities

they pass through and produce arts-education events. At

this ArtStrike, Lil Buck worked with dancers, melding the

1920s styles the kids were learning in their classes with

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ART STRUCK his own brand of dance; Woodard visited a poetry class,

teaching students how to perform their work in front

of an audience; and Woetzel directed overall, paying

special attention to involving the school’s teachers, in

order to ensure that the day’s lessons would live on.

Next, the students staged performances at an assembly,

using the material and lessons they’d been shown. The

principal said a week later everyone was so inspired

by the artists that they couldn’t stop talking about it.

And that’s the point: to create a memorable effect on

students and teachers. The ArtStrike event was part of

the Arts Program’s strategy group on arts education, an

idea sparked by Harman Family Foundation Executive

Director Barbara Harman. At the strategy meeting,

leaders from local public schools, charter schools,

the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kennedy

Center, and others gathered to analyze and address the

challenges to high school arts education.




Jennifer Bradley, founding director of the Center for Urban Innovation, talks with Air BNB CEO Brian Chesky

about how the sharing economy affects city life.

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BRIGHT IDEAS, BIG CITY

I PLEDGE ALLEGIANCE…“America works best when every individual is invested in a positive vision for our collective

future.” Those are the opening words to the Institute’s Franklin Project pledge, which

encourages young Americans to serve the country for one year. “Enlisting America: A Call

to National Service from Those Who Have Served” advances the idea that there are many

ways to serve the United States—whether through military or civilian national service. Three

hundred retired flag and general officers as well as 60 retired sergeants major have already

signed the pledge. And, in February, Franklin Project Director Jay Mangone published “Why

Every American Should Pledge One Year of Public Service” in Task & Purpose to outline and

promote the project’s vision. Originally unveiled by Lieutenant General (ret.) John D. Gardner

at the project’s summit at Gettysburg, the Franklin Project re-released the pledge this winter

and publicized it for signatures from the entire military, veterans, and family community. You

can read the pledge here: franklinproject.org/pledge

LATINOS RISINGWhy a Latinos program at the Institute? Latinos are driving population growth and the economy in the United States.. The average age of a Latino living in the United States is 27 compared with 41 for white Americans, and Latinos will account for 40 percent of US job growth over the next five years (see “The Latino Edge” on page 13). Yet an understanding of this community is lacking in important decision-making circles. That’s why the new Latinos and Society Program infuses the work of the Institute with Latino voices and faces, thanks to a generous gift from the Ricardo Salinas Scholarship Fund focusing on education, economic opportunity, and civic participation. The program plans to develop a new generation of Latino leaders. The program’s inaugural summit, America’s Future, held in May, featured a keynote address by US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro, as well as a conversation with CEO and Chairman of Graham Holdings Company Donald Graham and Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council Cecilia Muñoz. The summit also included panels with Latino business leaders, entrepreneurs, and Fellows from the Aspen Global Leadership Network.

aspeninstitute.org/ latinos-society

all, innovation is inseparable from risk, and

institutions that support the underserved—

like government and philanthropy—have

a low tolerance for failure. That’s why the

Institute’s new Center for Urban Innovation

will focus on urban innovators who are

serving these neighborhoods. The center

will also launch the DC Urban Innovation

Lab, which will support city innovators

working on Washington’s challenges and

team them up with the Institute’s wealth of

policy experts—education, health, economic

development. The lab will also connect

innovation enthusiasts, creating an urban-

innovation ecosystem.

aspeninstitute.org/urban-innovation

A shuttle service with the convenience of

Uber and a bus-fare price tag. A program

that turns surplus food into meals for

the homeless and provides work for the

unemployed. A start-up that teaches low-

income youth to create websites for local

businesses. These are urban innovations—

tools that improve city life, particularly for

underserved communities. While cities are

wellsprings of innovation, the benefits—

more jobs, greater access to education or

transportation, a higher standard of living—

don’t always reach the entire metropolitan

region. Entrepreneurs may overlook low-

income areas or find it difficult to get needed

technical assistance or financing. After

Castro


HARVARD HONORS DAMIAN WOETZELOn April 30, the Institute’s Arts Program Director

Damian Woetzel joined the ranks of past winners

Margaret Atwood, Mira Nair, Yo-Yo Ma, Jack Lemmon,

and John Updike as a recipient of the Harvard Arts

Medal. Established in 1995, the award acknowledges

alumnae who have both distinguished themselves in

the arts and contributed to education and the public

good through the arts. The ceremony, hosted by

Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, was followed

by a conversation between Woetzel and fellow

Harvard alumnus John Lithgow. Before the event,

Lithgow praised Woetzel, the first dancer to receive

the medal: “Damian is recognized for his leadership

of programs and initiatives serving performing

artists and their audiences and his dedication to the

vitality of our national arts profile.” A member of the

President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities,

Woetzel helped pilot its Turnaround Arts initiative,

which uses the arts to improve the country’s worst-

performing schools. aspeninstitute.org/arts

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DISCONNECTThe digital revolution has transformed society. Kids can

access tutorials, mentors, and interactive courses online.

And adults depend on the Internet for job boards, financial

services, and health care. But in order to take advantage of

the revolution, Americans must be connected. The Institute’s

Communications and Society Program tackles connectivity

in dialogues, task forces, and major reports, because access

to broadband, computers, and digital-literacy skills are 21st-

century requirements. One way to get more of us connected

is to reimagine public libraries, which have the DNA to thrive

in an information-rich world. But first, we have to dust off the

shelves and plug in. aspeninstitute.org/c&s

Nearly 80 percent of schools say their broadband connections are inadequate to meet their needs.

80%INADEQUATE

Who has broadband access at home?

74%

64%

53%

White Households

Latino Households

Black Households

Sources: The Communications and Society Program’s reports Learner at the Center of a Networked World and Rising to the Challenge: Re-Envisioning Public Libraries.

40% of US households making below $30,000 have no high-speed internet at home.

Woetzel accepts the Harvard Arts Medal.



TRAVELOGUETwo new programs take the Institute’s dynamic programming on the road.

The past year saw the launch of the Institute’s newest traveling programs: Aspen Across America, which ventures out into the nation; and Aspen Around Town, which takes a deeper dive into life in Washington. Aspen Across America promotes dialogue across the country with thoughtful conversations on topics such as business, immigration, health reform, education, the future of cities, and art in America. Public forums and private gatherings bring together Institute friends, supporters, and alumni with new groups interested in the Institute’s work—and bring Institute content to a diverse audience across the nation. Meanwhile, Aspen Around Town will feature special public events in and around Washington, DC, and will be presented jointly with prominent Washington-based cultural institutions. The events will showcase a range of topics with nationally recognized leaders and noted experts. Since November, both projects have hit the ground running. Here are just a few. aspeninstitute.org/aaa

Aspen Across America hosted 150 local entrepreneurs,

members of the University of Texas leadership, and students

from the University’s Business School for a conversation

between Walter Isaacson and Michael Dell about

technology, entrepreneurship, and the art of collaboration.

With the opening of the Innovation Institute for Food and

Health, Aspen Across America hosted an event with General

Atlantic’s Adrianna Ma; Mars Inc.’s Ralph Jerome; Military.

com’s and Affinity Labs’ Founder Christopher Michel;

Hampton Creek’s Josh Tetrick; and the Co-founder and CEO

of Jetsuite and Founding Executive of JetBlue Alex Wilcox;

moderated by Kai Ryssdal. More than 120 attended at the

University of California, Davis, where the panel discussed

food-industry innovations; a smaller working lunch followed.

Ryssdal Isaacson and Dell


Society of Fellows members flew to Bentonville, Arkansas, for a trip to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The group

was also welcomed into the home of prolific folk-art collectors to view their collection and discuss collecting. The day ended

with a dinner talk on art and museums with Crystal Bridges Founder Alice Walton.

Aspen Around Town launched the season with 400 guests

at the Kennedy Center in Washington for a conversation on

the creative process. Moderated by the Carlyle Group’s David

Rubenstein, the panel included Aspen CEO Walter Isaacson,

artist Leo Villareal, chef Wylie Dufresne, and architect Gary

Haney.

The Institute featured Roger Sant at a dinner salon with more

than 125 guests. Sant offered a reprise of his well-received

Aspen Ideas Festival presentation on the environmental

concerns of carbon emissions.

Rubenstein, Dufresne, and Haney Sant

Crystal Bridges

Museum of

American Art



The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong“This is a key feature for building resilience: not preparing for the last disaster but

preparing for any disaster. Often we do our preparation looking in the rearview

mirror. In New York City, most of the businesses put their generators in the

basement—because, after 9/11, they expected the next shock was going to come

from the air. And, of course, they all got flooded in Sandy. So if you think about

being prepared for any crisis, you will be better prepared for every crisis.”

—Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation

Moneyball for Government: The Book“We are flying blind in an era when we don’t need to be. It is easier to obtain data

and process it than ever before. We live in an era in which Google and others are

constantly running randomized controlled trials.”

—Peter Orszag, vice chairman at Citigroup and the former director of the Office of Management and Budget, co-author of the book with John Bridgeland, co-chair of the Institute’s Franklin Project and former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council

The Director“This is a post-Snowden novel. It’s the intersection of hacking and espionage. For a

spy novelist, all the themes that you write about—the classic themes of penetration,

moles, manipulation, deception—all those themes [are now] going to go into zeros

and ones. It is going to be about stealing the other side’s systems—not recruiting the

chief of the service but recruiting the systems administrator. That is the frontier of

espionage and the kind of thing that a spy novelist should try to get his mind around.”

—David Ignatius, columnist and associate editor at The Washington Post

Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools“Not everyone should be a teacher. It’s too important. The most important thing

I won, no question, was the right to hire. The most important thing I lost was the

right to fire.”

—Joel Klein, CEO of education-tech company Amplify and former chancellor of the New York City Department of Education

TRADER, CHEF, SOLDIER, SPY Every September through June, the Institute’s DC headquarters hosts the monthly Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series with some of the nation’s smartest thinkers and writers working today. This year, the series tackled everything from organic cooking to American schools; from natural disasters to international spy craft. Below is just a sample of the conversations from this season. To watch video of any of the events, go to aspeninstitute.org/booktalks.

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Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End“Just surviving in the world is not enough for most of us. We want to know that we

have a certain quality of life, and that might mean that we really care about another

priority, like whether our brains are intact, or whether we get to be with family, or

whether we get to hang out with our dog. It’s different for each person. The goal is

not a good death. The goal is a good life—as good of a life as possible—all the way

to the very end.”

—Atul Gawande, surgeon, public-health expert, and writer

Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir“I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t—because dead

boys forget how to cry. But why would a child impute he was dead? Why would

the abuse equal death? We as a society—even among the caring, even [with] the

outreach—we do damage. We victimize the child again. Because all of our caring and

outreach is laced with patriarchy and misogyny and homophobia. We send every

possible message to that child that there has been an irreversible ruining of you.”

—Charles Blow, columnist for The New York Times

Redeployment“There’s a tradition in war literature that the veteran experiences the ‘truth of war’

and is coming back and testifying to it. I didn’t want to have one veteran coming

back and testifying to the truth of the Iraq War narrative. I wanted twelve, and

twelve that didn’t match up with each other.”

—Phil Klay, National Book Award–winner

Excerpt from My Organic Life: How a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat Today“Over the past thirty years at Restaurant Nora, as I’ve made the rounds in the dining

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environment. The longer answer begins with a side of beef.”

—Chef Nora Pouillon, owner, Restaurant Nora in Washington, DC

Excerpt from Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice“I have to assume that there is a very real chance that Putin or members of his regime

will have me killed some day. Like anyone else, I have no death wish and I have no

intention of letting them kill me. I can’t mention most of the countermeasures I take,

but I will mention one: this book. If I’m killed, you will know who did it.”

—Bill Browder, Henry Crown Fellow and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management

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LEADING VOICES

Demonstrators react to the Michael

Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri,

August 15, 2014.

I HAVE A SOLUTIONBRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN THE POLICE AND

YOUNG PEOPLE OF COLOR IN FERGUSON.

When a white cop in Ferguson, Missouri, killed a black 18-year-old, Michael Brown, on August 9, 2014, it ignited a wave of protests across

the nation and forced Americans to once again confront the issue of race. Disenfranchised populations felt abused by the very powers

that were supposed to protect them, unrest led to demonstrations, and demonstrations led to conversations. In March, the Institute’s

Communications and Society Program traveled to St. Louis to convene activists and officers to tackle the tough issues that arise when

communities across the country feel the need to remind us all that black lives matter. NPR’s Michel Martin spoke with Police Sergeant Kevin Ahlbrand, president of the Missouri Fraternal Order of Police

and a member of the Ferguson Commission; Daniel Isom, former chief of police at the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department; and Clifton

Kinnie, a high school senior and Ferguson activist.

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MARTIN: Why were you attracted to the protest movement?

KINNIE: When Michael Brown was killed on August 9, I was sitting at home and I was scrolling on Instagram and Twitter. I’m seeing this body lying on the street, and I started to get frustrated. It was just the realization that enough was enough. There’s a culture disconnect—between the people who police and the ones they are trying to police.

MARTIN: Because of race? Because the police officers are white?

KINNIE: Yeah, to be honest. It’s when race and power and ego collide. I was speaking to middle-schoolers this past week, just getting to hear about their reactions and their encounters with police. These are 12-year-old kids I’m listening to, speaking about times they are getting stopped. They walk down the street getting stopped; they go into a store and get racially profiled.

MARTIN: On a day-to-day basis these officers feel afraid and may be behaving this way because they feel afraid. Do you believe that?

KINNIE: We all feel unsafe in this world. How can we come together to make the community safer? How can I make sure that your job goes as easy as possible? How can you make sure that I get to school safely without getting stopped?

ISOM: There is a fear on both sides. There is a fear on the side of the police officers. There is a fear on the side of young people in the community. There’s this issue of how do you police a community, how do you control behavior? All of those intersect in a way that sometimes brings about bad results. One of the things we have to look at is how we bring officers into the organization. How do we give them an understanding of the community that they are policing? How do we give them the skills to police and maintain control in a respectful way? Those are things we have to start thinking about.

MARTIN: We are not thinking about those things now? That’s not part of the recruiting and training process now?

ISOM: It is, but the focus is more on the issues of policing, tactics, laws. There are parts of the police academy that deal with community policing. But it’s a much smaller portion of the training process. A lot of police officers think that you have to really be authoritarian, very aggressive, to control behavior from the outset. Their mind-set is: Let me impose my will on this person to make sure that they respond to what I’m telling them to do.

MARTIN: Was there a point in your 31 years of experience where you feel things got off track?

AHLBRAND: Absolutely. The fiscal crises that cities have faced, downsizing police departments. Everybody talks about community-oriented policing—getting to know your neighborhood, getting out to know the people in your neighborhood. But when we downsize, these departments are so strapped for manpower that they are going from call to call to call, and they don’t have time to spend an extra ten minutes to find out what the real issue is.

MARTIN: Do you credit the Department of Justice report that African-Americans were disproportionally targeted?

AHLBRAND: Yes. I buy that because the cities that we are talking about are predominantly African-American communities.

MARTIN: Do you think that there’s an issue between white cops and black kids—that white cops somehow don’t see these kids as they are?

AHLBRAND: I believe it does happen out there. But on the whole, I would say no.

MARTIN: So it’s a few-bad-apples problem?

AHLBRAND: That’s part of the problem, but it goes back to: We need to rebuild those relationships, which we haven’t done in the last ten years.

ISOM: There are a lot of great police officers out there doing very good work. But no doubt there has been this tension between the police and young men of color for many years, and it is primarily centered around car stops and pedestrian stops. Often, police are called in to try to control behavior in neighborhoods that are challenged. One of the primary ways in which officers do that is vehicle stops and pedestrian stops. So, are we overusing that tactic

to try to control behavior, and what are those interactions like when we have them? That’s the core issue.

MARTIN: So you don’t think it’s race?

ISOM: It is race. It is race because the neighborhoods that it’s occurring in are

predominantly African-American. If you are having problems, whatever the problem might be, drugs sales or car break-ins, in a community, what does the community want us to do? What do they think it looks like for us to solve that problem? Certainly, the community is saying they don’t think it looks like us stopping a lot of their young people on the street. What are the other ways that the community and the police could work together to resolve some of these problems?

AHLBRAND: It’s a great point. In the city of St. Louis, one of the most prevalent calls that an officer would get is “suspicious person selling drugs on the corner.” Every day. Kids who are standing on the corner won’t believe that we got a call because the little lady who lives across the street is tired of the drug-dealing going on. They think we are just harassing them. That’s the dialogue that we need to get the community together on.

ISOM: The other thing is that, when you look at the adult-teenager relationship, there’s always this issue of “we are not equal.” That might be even worse when you are talking about cops dealing with young men of color. So that’s an issue that we have to deal with as well. Because if you encounter someone on the street and you don’t see him as equal, you see him as—

KINNIE: We have to lay this out on the table that this issue is deeply rooted in racism.

( applause )This whole ordeal is classism, is poverty. It’s a power structure; it’s a power problem. We have to get this idea out of our heads that, “Oh, it’s just a few bad apples.” Well, those few bad apples represent your whole department. So if those few bad apples are making

“The youth are ready; they want to do something. If someone brings

them a solution, you will have youth in swarms.” — Clifton Kinnie


LEADING VOICES

your department look bad, it’s showing that you are using racist practices. That’s your whole department. We are just not going to say, “a few bad apples,” because there is a cultural disconnect. We have to lay that on the table.

MARTIN: I must say, all of these racist e-mails in the Ferguson department, racist jokes about the president and the first lady—what is that?

AHLBRAND: It’s totally unacceptable behavior. But if you go into any business, you are going to see the same thing. Cops aren’t that much different than everybody else, and you are going to have that.

MARTIN: If we could get a bunch of officers here, what would they say?

AHLBRAND: Well, we went from being heroes after 9/11 to being vilified today. Some officers that worked those front lines in Ferguson for 12-hour days were spat on, had urine thrown on them, had rocks thrown at them, were shot at, faced protesters within inches of their faces, saying they were going to rape their daughters and kill them. Those officers—some of the restraint shown was just absolutely incredible. The officers now feel like they are all out there by themselves.

KINNIE: I’m all for peaceful protesting. I worked with my community to ensure that justice gets done. We need to pay attention to

the fact that there were young people out there getting gassed. We have to understand that the youth feel that the police are not there to serve and protect them. Police understand, just by putting on a badge, automatically their job is going to be dangerous. We have to understand, as a community, that we have a right to protest. We have the right to get our voices heard. What we don’t have a right to is the way we are treated by police and how we were treated in Ferguson.

ISOM: No doubt there is a disconnect between the police and young people. It’s rooted in race. It’s rooted in class. It’s rooted in the neighborhood that you live in. There are a lot of variables that go into this disconnect between law enforcement and young men of color. The question is, really, what we do about it. How do we provide better understanding? How do we get them to understand their role in the community?

KINNIE: I have a solution to how we can bridge the gap.

MARTIN: Let’s hear it. Let’s fix this right now.

KINNIE: Working primarily with student organizers around high schools would be a way we could bridge the gap between the police departments and the youth—specifically the youth, going straight toward them and hearing their concerns. Maybe we could set up a board. So having maybe delegates from each high school representing their concerns. Overall, just forming that relationship between the police forces in order to have a conversation.

MARTIN: Do you think you could pull that off, that kids would do it?

KINNIE: A lot of the youth are ready; they want to do something. The issue is: They don’t know how. So if someone brings them a solution or a program like the one I just suggested, you will have youth in swarms. Definitely.

For video, go to aspeninstitute.org/racialdivide

Kinnie

Ahlbrand, Kinnie, Isom, and Martin

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LEADING VOICES

This February, the Institute’s Business and Society Program held an interactive gathering in San Francisco—“Making Purpose Work”—designed to find out how to generate innovation and productivity while also creating a higher purpose in society. The meeting featured dialogues, field

trips to leading companies, and workshops with business scholars and executives from more than 40 companies. Below, Adam Lashinsky of Fortune magazine interviews LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner on how a for-profit company can be a force for good.

LASHINSKY: LinkedIn helps people promote their careers, but it isn’t saving lives. It’s not curing cancer; it’s not serving in the Peace Corps. If you really want to make the world a better place, you could do a long list of things before joining a very successful company.

WEINER: In our vision at LinkedIn, our dream is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. That begins with representing your professional identity to the world—your experiences, your skills, your ambitions, the knowledge that you possess. You listed a few examples of objectives that some might deem more worthy and more valuable than creating economic opportunity for people. I would counter that creating economic opportunity is at the heart of every single thing you just listed.

There is nothing more profoundly important to the world than creating economic opportunity. Economic opportunity enables people to feel as if they have a chance and as if they have a voice. It’s having a say. It’s being able to be productive. It’s being able to contribute to society. At LinkedIn, we believe there’s nothing more important.

LASHINSKY: The next logical step in the argument becomes that LinkedIn is critical to that process. If you’re successful, LinkedIn is integral to helping create economic choice.

WEINER: The more economic opportunity there is in the world, the more the world benefits. So if LinkedIn can be a change engine to that effect, that’s wonderful. We certainly don’t need to exclusively own this notion of creating economic opportunity.

In terms of the role we play specifically—the notion of a résumé or your professional identity—that’s really only the first step to getting started on LinkedIn. The mission of LinkedIn is to connect the world’s professionals, to make them more productive and successful. That’s the overarching objective that we measure ourselves against. With 347 million members today, there are roughly 780 million knowledge-workers who are students in the world. That’s the immediate addressable opportunity. The dream, the vision, is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, all three-billion-plus people. And we’re

in this unique position where we can operationalize our vision statement. It’s going to lead us to doing something that has never been imagined before, let alone executed: we’re in a position, by virtue of today’s technology, where we can digitally map the global economy. So:

One: a digital profile for every member of the global workforce, three-billion-plus people.

Two: a profile for every company in the world, roughly 60 million to 70 million companies when you include small- and medium-sized businesses.

Three: a digital representation of every job made possible by those companies—full-time, part-time, for-profit, volunteer.

Four: a digital representation of every skill required to obtain one of those opportunities.

Five: a digital presence for every higher-education organization that enables those individuals to acquire the skills they need to realize the opportunities.

Six: make it easy for every individual, every company, and every university to share their profession’s relevant knowledge.

And then: We’re going to take a step back and allow all forms of capital— intellectual capital, working capital, and of course human capital—to flow, to work, and to be leveraged. In doing so, the hope is we can help lift and transform the global economy.

For video, go to youtube.com/aspenlinkedin

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LEADING VOICES

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ISAACSON: What’s happening to American kids today?

PUTNAM: Kids from highly educated homes are getting better and better. Kids from the lower third of America are getting worse and worse. That opportunity gap is a growing gap. You can see it in the amount of time parents spend reading to their kids, what we call “Goodnight Moon time.” There used to be no gap in the time parents spent reading to their kids. Now, there’s a 45-minute-a-day gap. If you know about modern brain science, you know that it is unbelievably important. The infant brain develops through verbal interaction with adults.

It’s similar for the amount of money we spend on kids. Similar for the amount of social support they get from their communities. Similar for family stability. There are big gaps in all these support systems—from schools to churches to scouts. Extracurricular activities give kids a chance to learn soft skills: teamwork, grit, delayed gratification. Now, if you want to play high school football, you’ve got to pay $400 per kid per sport. That means those kids’ chances in life are influenced not by their own skills and abilities but by their parents’ resources. As of now, high-scoring poor kids are less likely to graduate from college than low-scoring rich kids. That is exactly the opposite of the American dream. Your chances at life shouldn’t depend upon your parents; they should depend upon you.

ISAACSON: Is the internet closing this divergence or exacerbating it?

PUTNAM: It’s making it worse. The access gap has closed—just about all kids all across America have smartphones. But when you watch how kids use technology, richer kids use it in ways that are more calculated to help them make progress—like the Khan Academy. Poor kids, who lack the surrounding support of adults, tend to use it just for entertainment. Kids from the lower third of American society are isolated.

A striking consequence is what I call “airbags.” All kids get into trouble—poor kids, black kids, white kids. But when kids from educated backgrounds get into trouble, airbags instantly inflate to protect the child. A friend called up, upset: her grandson had been arrested in Colorado. Allegedly, he was selling drugs. She was devastated: “What’s it going to do to the family?” And she was worried about her grandson. But then she said, “My daughter flew

Harvard Professor Robert Putnam spoke with Institute CEO Walter Isaacson in March at an Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series event about his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, which explores the growing inequality gap.

out there, we’ve got the best lawyer, and we’ve found the right rehab. So it will probably work out.” Airbags. If exactly the same thing had happened to a black kid on the south side of Chicago—no airbags. They have no one coaching them. When you think poor kid, think isolated kid.

ISAACSON: What’s this doing to our economy?

PUTNAM: Not investing in poor kids costs about 4 percent GDP a year. A big chunk of that is these kids’ health—they are much less healthy, much more obese than rich kids, and are getting more obese faster. They are going to get diabetes more, they are going to get

sicker longer, and somebody has to pay for that. But the important part is: the lost opportunity. We are writing off 23 million potential workers every year. And helping them won’t hurt our own kids—rich, educated kids. It will help everyone be better off. Not just morally. Economically, materially, we’re better off if we invest in other people’s kids. Over these kids’ lifetime, $5 trillion better off. For example, if Atlanta had the same equality of opportunity that Salt Lake City has, Atlanta’s economy would be 11 percent bigger.

ISAACSON: What can be done?

PUTNAM: End this 30-year stagnation of real wages for less educated men. That would have a powerful effect on family structure. High-quality, expensive, early childhood education has a very high payback rate. Then there are smaller things, like mentoring. Next, give kids public, secular education with soft skills—football, art, so on. These kids need airbags. They need adults who can guide them through the complicated process of figuring out what school to go to and so on. These kids lack savvy. Cuts to community colleges, for example, have come disproportionately from advising and counseling kids. That makes the dropout rates high.

This is not a case where we don’t have any good policy ideas. This is a case where we don’t have the political will. We don’t think of these as our kids. We think of them as somebody else’s kid.

For video, go to aspeninstitute.org/putnam

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JOINING FORCES TO FIGHT CHILD MALNUTRITION

T o walk through the children’s ward at Muhimbili National Hospital in Tanzania is to tour Africa’s food paradox. The tiny patients, many of them under five, are often being treated for and surviving diseases that would have killed them just 20 years ago, including malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia, and HIV.

But far too many continue to suffer from the effects of malnutrition, ranging from anemia and vitamin deficiencies to wasting and physical stunting.

Beyond treatment with antibiotics, antimalarial drugs, and iron supple-

ments, these children need nutritious foods. And they aren’t getting them.Across Africa, agricultural investments and food production are rising,

which is good news. But the increased availability of food on the continent has not translated into improved nutrition and health. Indeed, the num-ber of African children who suffer from physical and mental stunting, an end-stage irreversible effect of chronic malnutrition, has increased to 58.6 million in 2012 from 50.8 million in 2000. And the regions spearheading the jump in agricultural production often see the highest rates of stunting.

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Two New Voices Fellows found that the greatest benefit of their fellowship wasn’t just media training to increase visibility for their

programs in Africa—it was finding each other and working to end malnutrition. BY RAMADHANI ABDALLAH NOOR, M.D.

Many of the undernourished young patients at Muhimbili, like their brethren across Africa, will suffer physical and mental limitations for the rest of their lives, robbing the continent of its most precious resource, hu-man capital, for decades to come.

When I joined the Institute’s New Voices Fellowship, the disconnect be-tween the medical advances in child care and continued poor nutrition weighed on me. As a medical doctor, I helped research new malaria vac-cines, which hold the promise of finally beating back this major childhood

killer. I advocated for low-cost innovations and expanded immunization programs, which have already saved the lives of many children. But if chil-dren were increasingly surviving diarrhea, malaria, and pneumonia only to suffer from malnutrition, we were not achieving our goals.

As part of New Voices, I had the good luck to connect with another Fellow, Dr. Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, who approached this issue from the other direction. As CEO of the Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network, based in South Africa, Sibanda is at the forefront

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of helping African governments set their agricultural policies. Together, we decided, we could help develop a new strategy for combating child malnu-trition by bringing together agricultural scientists, nutrition experts, and medical doctors.

As members of the New Voices Fellowship program, Sibanda and I were embarking on a journey to find a broader international audience for our views on key development challenges through an intensive and strategic yearlong program of media training. But during that process, we found that one of the most important audiences for our messages was within the fellowship itself, where a diverse collection of development experts from Africa and other parts of the developing world could compare notes and come up with new solutions.

To really turn the situation around, it is critical for countries to move toward large-scale food fortification and promotion of “nutrition-sensitive” agriculture by encouraging farmers to produce a healthy and affordable mix of foodstuffs that emphasize nutrition. That agriculture means that small-scale African farmers need to be encouraged to produce diverse food products beyond staples such as maize. This requires improved soils, seeds, fertilizers, irrigation systems, safe processing of harvests, and market access.

But in most countries, agriculture , nutrition, and health initiatives are often planned and implemented by different ministries that have minimal to no interaction. In Tanzania, for example, the Ministry of Agriculture is implementing a support system using agriculture-extension officers, while its Ministry of Health is rolling out community-health workers. These two

Together, we decided, we could help develop a new strategy for combating child malnutrition by bringing together agricultural

scientists, nutrition experts, and medical doctors.

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programs are complementary and should work together. But they don’t. To address this problem, Sibanda and I have teamed up on two new

initiatives. The first is the Agriculture Nutrition Health joint forum, co-ordinated and led by the Africa Academy of Public Health in collabora-tion with Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the United States. Through this forum, we have convened two meetings attended by representatives from the Tanzanian ministries of health and agriculture as well as the prime minister’s office, delegates from various NGOs and development partners, and academic and research institutions working in agriculture, nutrition, and health. These meetings marked the first time in Tanzania that such a diverse group met to discuss integrating the official response to malnutri-tion through agricultural development.

In our latest meeting, in January in Dar Es Salaam, we linked up with ATONU, a regional initiative led by Sibanda’s organization that aims to foster national and regional capacities to evaluate nutrition-sensitive agriculture programs and advise governments on how to use agricultural-

development programs to meet nutrition and health needs. Importantly, we had an opportunity to learn from a successful program from the re-gion, the Mama SASHA (Sweet Potato Action for Security and Health in Africa) project, which aims to harness the lowly but nutritious sweet potato to improve health in a number of Kenyan communities. Through the African Academy of Public Health and Sibanda’s group, we will con-tinue to coordinate with agriculture programs to better integrate nutri-tion and health goals.

To see further gains in child health, we need not only different ap-proaches but also more people. Agricultural-development programs can and should encompass nutrition and health objectives on a larger scale. These new approaches to child health can ensure that children like the small patients at Muhimbili Hospital thrive—and can eventually play their own part in lifting Africa.

Ramadhani Abdallah Noor, M.D., is the co-founder of the Malaria Control Forum and a New Voices Fellow at the Institute.

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DEAR ASPEN WORDS:THANK YOU FOR HELPING ME SELL MY NOVEL .

How the Novel Editing workshop at Aspen Words helped one writer believe in herself after years of lonely work,

dashed hopes, and persistence—and introduced her to an agent who believed in her, too. BY ALEXANDRA OLIVA


I first learned about Aspen Summer Words by way of a friend’s glowing recommendation. Researching further, I was intrigued by the conference’s Novel Editing workshop. In the typical writing workshop, you can submit only 15 or 20 pages of prose, but here was an opportunity to discuss hundreds of pages. I’m not a short-

story writer, I’m a novelist, and submitting the opening of a 300-plus-page novel to workshops time and again gets old. Eventually, you want to push past the question of “Would you want to keep reading?” and address something more substantive. Here was my chance; I had to apply. When I learned a couple of months later that I’d been accepted, I was ecstatic.

The Aspen Summer Words experience offers so much more than work-shops, but in the weeks leading up to the conference, my main—almost sole—focus was my workshop. I had 600 pages of reading to complete, and my excitement about meeting my fellow novelists grew as I delved into their beautiful and extraordinarily varied submissions. Preparing for the pro-fessional consultations offered at the conference was an afterthought—or at least I tried to convince myself that it should be. I knew I was going to be matched with some combination of top-notch agents and editors for a pair of 15-minute meetings, but I did my best to keep my expectations low, reminding myself that I was at least one manuscript overhaul away from being ready to query literary agents—maybe more, considering that the ending of my novel was barely more than an outline. The consultations, I told myself, were only practice.

And then, a few days into the con-ference, I found myself sitting across from Lucy Carson from the Friedrich Agency, and she told me how much she’d enjoyed the opening of my nov-el. Sitting there, all I could think was how lucky I would be to work with her. Even in our brief conversation, it was clear that she got it—she recognized which aspects of the story were most important to me and understood but wasn’t put off by the challenges I had yet to overcome. The conversation ended with her telling me how eager she was to read more and me floating away. And though discussing the profes-sional consultations was a source of bonding for us writers throughout the week, I didn’t tell anyone how well the meeting went. I didn’t want to raise my own hopes. By the time I’d reached Aspen, I’d been calling myself a writer for nearly a decade, and I had two shelved manuscripts and an MFA to show for it—but no tangible success. No bylines or publications, just a hefty stack of rejections topped by a couple of close calls. Over the years, I’d learned more than I’d ever wanted to know about not counting chickens when all I had were eggs.

Each morning after the day’s consultation, I continued having breakfast with my fellow writers—of fiction, memoir, poetry—at the Hearthstone House. Then I’d walk to the Hotel Jerome, grab a coffee from the table in the hall, and take my seat in the Novel Editing workshop, where we dove into a new manuscript each day. After workshop, we slipped down to lunch as a group, joking about how each day’s spread was better than the last and how we were always the first group to reach the buffet. Between the workshops, the panels, the downtime bonding, and extracurricular fun, the

sense of community grew each day. I remember calling my husband one evening and telling him how affirming I found the whole experience to be, how even though I hadn’t yet found my path through the trees, being at Aspen reassured me that I was at least in the right forest.

It’s difficult to be told no, it’s not good enough, you’re not good enough, over and over again. I’ve often doubted my choices and my commitment to writing. There were times in the last few years when the only thing that kept me going was an unquantifiable sense that I was getting better, that every time someone said no, I was able to find a way to make my writing stronger. Twice, I put aside a manuscript with a six-digit word count and years of effort behind it in order to begin working on a different idea that felt more exciting. It was difficult—not my-plane-has-crashed-in-the-wilderness-and-I-need-to-survive-with-a-broken-leg-and-a-head-wound difficult, but challenging in a slow, internal way.

That’s why even if Lucy hadn’t asked to read my full manuscript, even if everything had stopped there, the Aspen Summer Words experience would have been worth it: for mak-ing me feel like I belonged, like I was seeing the break in the trees, and maybe, just maybe, that my path was near. And for giving me the opportu-nity to meet and interact with other writers—so many of whom were not only amazing talents but extraordi-narily fun people.

But everything didn’t stop there. The last night of the conference, just as I returned to my hotel from an open-mic event, I received an email from Lucy telling me she’d finished my manuscript, and, yes, it needed work, but she wanted to do that work with me. I think it took me an hour to craft what was essen-tially a two-word reply: Yes, please.

The next day, I remained in shock. Delayed at the Denver International Airport, I had dinner with several of my fellow conference attendees—and Julia Glass, who’d been in Aspen leading a fiction workshop. Word of Lucy’s email slipped out and I stumbled, overwhelmed and backtracking, trying not to jinx myself—I’m not superstitious until I am, and I feared that speaking of it would somehow undo the experience, that Lucy would send a follow-up email saying she was mistaken and my novel was clearly a lost cause. Then Julia put her hand on my shoulder and said, so kindly, “You have an agent.” It was a powerful moment, a powerful experience, and one for which I will forever be grateful.

Lucy didn’t recant her offer. She’s been guiding me ever since, asking the questions that needed to be asked, challenging me, and pushing me in just the right way and with endless enthusiasm. She’s been a true pleasure to work with, and she sold my debut novel, The Last One, to Ballantine Bantam Dell, a Random House imprint. I have a publisher and an editor I adore, whose authors I have long admired. I’ve found my path. And it wouldn’t have happened—at least not like this—if I hadn’t attended Aspen Summer Words.

Alexandra Oliva is the author of the novel The Last One, available in 2016.

“The last night of the conference, just as I returned to my hotel from an open-mic event, I received an email from Lucy telling me she’d finished

my manuscript, and, yes, it needed work, but she wanted

to do that work with me. I think it took me an hour to craft what

was essentially a two-word reply: Yes, please.”


ASPEN IMPACT

I cannot express my gratitude for saving me from the daily verbal harassment I had to hear coming to work and going from work,” says Gul Sika, a founding member of the Alliance for Artisan Enterprise who until recently had to walk more than a mile each day to and from work at Kandahar Treasure. “Now with the ride provided, I can come

and go in peace and am happy knowing that I am safe.”Sika is a widow with three children living in the patriarchal society of

Kandahar, Afghanistan. Women like her have few opportunities or infra-structure in place to guide them in earning a living. Kandahar Treasure,

an all women’s social enterprise, is Sika’s answer for help in taking care of her children, who now have an opportunity to attend school instead of begging on the streets. The group, which employs 21 full-time women and nine men, provides work to more than 400 women, giving them a way to sell their khamak, finely detailed needlework.

Kandahar Treasure is a pioneering initiative, as it is both self-sustaining and led by and owned by women in the province—not a popular trend in Afghan society. The women take pride in knowing that they have proved a model of success in the midst of 12 years of war and destruction.

GIVING KANDAHAR WOMEN A VOICE

A partnership between the Aspen Global Health and Development program and an artisan enterprise gives women new respect, new

freedom—and new markets so they can support their families.

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ASPEN IMPACT

Were it not for the support of its partners and friends in the United States, Kandahar Treasure would remain invisible. One of those important partners is the Alliance for Artisan Enterprise, part of the Institute’s Global Health & Development program. The Alliance’s mission is to support the power and potential of the artisan sector to create jobs, increase incomes, enhance cultural heritage, and promote development that respects the uniqueness of people and place.

The transportation to and from work that Kandahar Treasure now pro-vides Sika is made possible by a small loan given through the Alliance’s partnership with Kiva, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to allevi-ate poverty. The partnership between Kiva and the Alliance was created to provide financial assistance to artisans, who often have difficulty accessing resources. Because Sika is no longer verbally abused on her commute, her performance at work—and that of her 20 colleagues—is now enhanced.

The corporate partners have joined the Alliance for a reason: some to help the world, some to look good to their existing consumers, some to attract new customers. But the artisans involved in making products that they market directly, or whose products are marketed through corpora-tions, have made it their mission to lift themselves and their families out of the indignities and even atrocities they face daily in Afghanistan’s remote villages. These artisans need a platform to raise their voice to policymak-ers, corporations, and financial institutions about their needs and desires. Kandahar Treasure is proud to partner with the Alliance in giving voice to the hundreds of women in Kandahar who dream of a better future for their children.

Rangina Hamidi is the founder of Kandahar Treasure, a partner of the Institute’s Alliance for Artisan Enterprise.

Kandahar Treasure is a pioneering initiative, as it is both self-sustaining and led by and owned by women in the province—

not a popular trend in Afghan society.

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ASPEN IMPACT

Expanding teacher leadership is critical to the success of public education. The idea enjoys broad support. But actually distributing leadership responsibility challenges deep-seated traditions. The Aspen Institute is taking a national leadership role in addressing these challenges.

In 2013, the Institute’s Education and Society Program created a teach-er-leadership working group that provides thought partnerships, critical advice, and networking opportunities to education leaders at the vanguard of teacher leadership. District and charter leaders, union leaders, classroom teach-ers, reform advocates, and policy experts could all explore dilemmas from divergent perspectives and forge practical solutions to vexing challenges. Scott Thompson, deputy chief of human capital for Wash-ington, DC, public schools, described one working-group meeting as “extraordi-narily thought-provoking, relevant, and timely ... theoretical enough to make us rethink and question our assumptions but not so theoretical that it won’t be immedi-ately helpful and relevant.”

Out of this intensive work, the Pro-gram published Leading From the Front of the Classroom: A Roadmap for Teacher Lead-ership that Works in 2014. This set of re-sources—including profiles of promising practices in Denver and Tennessee as well as in Chicago’s Noble Network of charter schools—has been used as an anchor text in a series of teacher-leader programs sponsored by the US Department of Education, and it is shaping new work and important conversations in school systems across the country. This teacher-leadership tool kit was cre-ated in partnership with Leading Educators, a New Orleans–based reform-support organization that works with charter and traditional systems in New Orleans and nationally.

For Education and Society, the focus on teacher leadership grows out of several years of strengthening the design and implementation of new-teacher evaluation systems and the recognition that the potential for break-

throughs comes from developing teachers at scale—and this cannot hap-pen without proven, effective teachers assuming greater responsibility for mentoring and developing their peers.

On the day the report was released, both Joel Klein, ed-reform advo-cate and former New York City schools chancellor, and Randi Weingar-ten, American Federation of Teachers president, tweeted about it, dem-onstrating the Institute’s ability to transcend traditional politics. And the tool kit is influencing the field in significant ways. The Kentucky Depart-

ment of Education, in partnership with Hope Street Group, sent a tool-kit link to every teacher in the state to inspire new ideas about teacher leadership. According to Robin Hebert, of the Kentucky Depart-ment of Education, the tool kit provides “concrete, step-by-step guidance and direc-tion for how to begin, assess, measure, and build a strong model of teacher leadership at the local level.”

For Denver Superintendent Tom Boas-berg, making the role of principal more manageable is a major motivation for in-vesting in teacher leadership: “In any other knowledge-based profession, it’s an absolute given that you won’t see people trying to coach or supervise more than six or eight people,” Boasberg says. “Yet in schools, we ask school leaders to coach and supervise 30, 40, 50 people.” So Denver created a Team Lead role, where accomplished teachers are given reduced teaching loads to make time

for coaching and supervising other teachers. For teaching to assume its rightful place alongside medicine, law, en-

gineering, and other esteemed professions, teachers themselves need to lead. Through its partnership with Leading Educators and the publication of Leading From the Front of the Classroom, the Program is turning this idea into action.

Ross Wiener is the executive director of the Education and Society Program at the Aspen Institute.

TEACHING TEACHERS TO LEAD OTHER TEACHERS

A new working group to help good teachers train other teachers is filling a gap—providing practical steps to extend proven skills from one teacher to many.

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Outside the Middle East, news stories

point out instability, violence, and

extremism. Inside the Middle East, business

people brim with ideas, initiative, energy,

and success. The Institute’s Middle East

Programs recently brought together

ten of the region’s highest-impact tech

entrepeneurs for a week of immersive

mentorship—an experience its participants

describe as worldview-changing and

business-changing. BY TONI VERSTANDIG AND PETER WALKER KAPLAN

SEIZINGHOPE

55


Bouazizi, a self-motivated entrepreneur with a high school education whose livelihood selling vegetables was stifled by cumbersome bureaucracy, was repeatedly abused, demeaned by government forces, and finally stripped of his dignity. His story is emblematic of the interwoven political and economic origins of the transitions that dramatically rocked Tunisia and the region thereafter. Bouazizi wanted the quiet normality of daily life: to provide for his family and to have economic pathways to greater prosperity. He sought this prosperity despite high unemployment and rampant corruption. Generating economic opportunity is the core of the Aspen Institute’s Middle East Programs. The programs’ mission is to catalyze and convene networks of global leaders to deepen relationships and develop pragmatic economic and policy initiatives that advance stability and prosperity in the Middle East. Middle East Programs’ leaders steadfastly believe that in a region suffering from slow economic growth and high rates of youth unemployment, high-impact start-ups and small- and medium-sized companies are the chief engines for job creation. (The program houses Partners for a New Beginning, a public-private partnership focused on advancing entrepreneurship and job creation across the Middle East and North Africa.) Linked with security and political opportunity, these are what will advance stability and growth. Sustained investment in the education and global exposure of early-stage entrepreneurs helps strengthen their ventures. In recognition of that principle, last year the Institute, with support from the Blackstone Charitable Foundation, launched the Middle East Entrepreneurship Program, an immersive entrepreneurship training program for ten of the region’s highest-impact technology start-ups. This endeavor was not only conceived as a response to regional needs, it was an acknowledgment of the region’s great potential energy. Indeed, even if the Middle East is described in daily stories as a place of political instability, resource scarcity, and extremism, in the region itself there is great hope. It brims with promising realities, ready to be stitched into a brighter narrative. This is the region, after all, that has a higher per capita GDP than China or India, where investments tripled between 2009 and 2013, and is populated by about 370 million

people, 50 percent of whom are less than 25 years old. The Middle East pulses with energy not only because of its enormous youth cohort but also because it is in the midst of a connectivity revolution. Between 2007 and 2012, internet penetration jumped 294 percent. Mobile-data traffic grew 107 percent in 2013, dwarfing North America’s 77 percent increase. “Seven percent of the world seeks content in its language,” the entrepreneur, investor, and author Chris Schroeder explains. “But that content makes up less than 1 percent of what is online globally.” Young people with connectivity and a viable market need investment, mentors, and role models. Fadi Ghandour, founder and CEO of Aramex, the largest logistics company in the region and the first Arab-based international company to trade its shares on the NASDAQ stock exchange, argues that the Arab world is in the process of transforming into a mega-region of creative thinking and growth. “In fact,” he explained to Innovator Magazine last October, “entrepreneurial vigor is already palpable across various Arab cities, from Cairo to Amman, Dubai to Jeddah, even war-torn Gaza.” Incubators, accelerators, and start-up summits have proliferated across the Middle East to the point that some urban centers are regarded as tech hubs. Forbes described Amman, for example, as a “huge emerging market … becoming [an] economic engine in [its] own right.” Another recent report on Cairo’s technology landscape describes a highly connected, well-developed ecosystem with approximately 300 growing companies. Scholars and experts in the region offer a cocktail of explanations for why entrepreneurship is thriving. Entrepreneurship is by nature infectious, inspirational, and sometimes palliative to social ills; it has the ability to redefine the limits of a “profession”; successful entrepreneurial ventures often beget jobs; many entrepreneurial ventures seek to fix the problems of everyday life to appeal to the consumer market. Entrepreneurship also means bonding. It can connect businesses, some of which are remote or disconnected, with a world of consumers, investors, and stakeholders. Those connections are growing wider and deeper all over the Middle East and North Africa. Through a weeklong training program in Silicon Valley, Middle East Programs offered entrepreneurs from the Arab world with

THE STORY OF THE 2011 ARAB UPRISINGS BEGINS WITH MOHAMED BOUAZIZI, WHOSE SELF-IMMOLATION TRIGGERED THE FIRST VIVID PROTEST OF WHAT IS NOW KNOWN AS THE

“ARAB SPRING.”

SEIZING HOPE


SUPPORTING ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS A CHALLENGE THAT MIDDLE EAST PROGRAMS HAS ACCEPTED; IT’S WHAT BOUAZIZI STOOD FOR. HE PROVIDED FOR HIS FAMILY AND TOOK PAINS TO DISTRIBUTE SURPLUS TO THOSE LESS FORTUNATE THAN HIMSELF.

proven traction in their local and regional markets the opportunity to learn from world-class entrepreneurship experts. They came to the United States to learn firsthand from Silicon Valley pioneers the secrets of their success, as well as strategies to overcome failure. The entrepreneurs experienced a week of face-to-face meetings with distinguished leaders such as Nest CEO Tony Fadell, Stanford Entrepreneurship Professor Tom Byers, Square COO Sarah Friar, Rally Health COO and President David Ko, and Cloudera’s CTO and Co-Founder Amr Awadallah, a Middle Eastern success story himself. Each one shared perspectives on what will make the entrepreneurs’ products and services, and their companies, truly innovative and scalable. The program workshopped not just company strengths but also company challenges. In and out of sessions, entrepreneurs identified their problems, sharing case studies and field wisdom with one another and imploring mentors for advice. Sessions focused on various pillars: hiring talent and building team culture, pitching skills, thinking about design, attracting investment, legal education, network growth, scaling success and innovation, and brand development. Advising on scaling strategies, Awadallah told the group not to be afraid of making mistakes and also not to persist in failing. Tom Byers guided the group through approaches to “thinking outside the box.” Nadia Roumani of Stanford’s d:school, which instructs design thinking and innovation, urged the group to design products with portraits of consumers in mind. Advising the group on how to attract investment, Rouz Jazayeri of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers discussed an investor’s calculus when selecting which ventures to fund. Silicon Valley guru Bill Joos listened to each start-up’s pitch, slashing at excessive details until each pitch was leaner than subjects thought possible. Former Andreessen Horowitz partner Kristina Simmons shared her findings from developing Lululemon’s brand. Craig Tighe, a partner at DLA Piper, and Farshad Owji, a principal at Owji Law, offered guidelines on establishing businesses in the United States. Fadi Bishara, founder of Blackbox, a two-week

acceleration program in Silicon Valley, reminded the group that to go fast, businesses must abandon squeaky-wheel employees and celebrate victories. These were but a selection of the conversations. Social impact was another mission of the program. Middle East Programs mandated that the entrepreneurs, equipped with tools to expand their businesses and thus create new jobs, commit to offering their time and knowledge to local entrepreneurs as a way of giving back. Supported entrepreneurs have a stronger chance of creating jobs for their respective communities. Supported entrepreneurs can also demonstrate to investors and business leaders their communities’ potential. The week shaped participants, provided them with inspiration when their ventures stalled, connected them to mentors from whom they sought advice, and challenged them to revise their business-value propositions. And what followed was remarkable: the ripples that Middle East Programs stirred in January have since become waves. From a mission to a plan to a program, Middle East Programs has demonstrated that investing in talented, aspirational communities is a worthy bargain. The Middle East is and will be experiencing turmoil and transition for some time to come. Inevitably, each country will ebb, flow, and find its own equilibrium. Bouazizi’s example, however, should catalyze support for increased economic opportunity in the region and around the world. Supporting entrepreneurship is a challenge that Middle East Programs has accepted; it’s what Bouazizi stood for. He provided for his family and took pains to distribute surplus produce to those less fortunate than himself. Enacting a Ben Franklin principle, he ran a business well, and when he saw an opportunity to do good, he never hesitated. He was described by loved ones as “hardworking,” “funny,” “dutiful,” and “generous.” Bouazizi was an entrepreneur. May we carry forward his legacy.

Toni Verstandig is chair of the Institute’s Middle East Programs, and Peter Walker Kaplan is the program coordinator.


“MEEP was a lifetime experience; I can’t wait to have another like it.”

“We are all going to take away from this much more than we came in with. … The people we met, the pace at which we were going, the quality of the interactions we had: I think it’s been extremely amazing.”

“It was outstanding. You see things a different way. … For me, what I saw here is the spirit and the culture. Hopefully, I can transfer that to ShopGo.”

ZINEB AND DRISS DRISSI Co-Founders, Dabadoc, Morocco

Dabadoc, a database that pairs clients with medical practitioners, entered MEEP at the end of its first year and is one of its smallest ventures. Since the conclusion of MEEP, its clientele has grown from 1,000 to 2,000 medical specialists and generalists, a 100 percent increase. It has also expanded its operations to Algeria and Tunisia, already achieving its next-step scaling goals. Dabadoc has been the focus of six written and broadcast interviews relating to MEEP. The Drissis told The Aspen Idea that they have focused on perfecting their workforce, a takeaway from MEEP: “We are hiring more people and recruiting a better team; the idea is to focus on making a great team.”

“I will make it a point to wake up each morning and remember that today is a great day because I’m building this amazing thing. … I would have loved for this program to be ten days longer.”

FIRAS AL-OTAIBI CCO & Co-Founder, Kharabeesh, Jordan

Kharabeesh, which produces content on YouTube in the form of satire, cartoons, political commentary, and hybrids of each, has continued to grow and recently exceeded one billion page views. It has expanded its program since MEEP and is now opening another major round of funding; it has already been approached by major investment groups. And since reaching a billion views, it has begun to scale its brand to the United States.

LAMIA TABBAA-BIBIFounder, Little Thinking Minds, Jordan

“Our sessions at Stanford were incredibly inspirational,” says Tabbaa-Bibi, whose company targets pre-K learners to game-ify numerical, phonic, and grammatical education. “This will change the way Little Thinking Minds views product design.” Since Tabbaa-Bibi’s week in Silicon Valley, she has secured another angel investment for that project. On the heels of MEEP, she also announced the launch of the first Arabic digital library and guided-reading program, a social initiative to fight regional illiteracy. Learn more at IreadArabic.com. Since MEEP, Tabbaa-Bibi was announced as one of USAID’s All Children Read grantees: she will be one of 2015’s 14 global winners, selected from 250 nominees.

MOE GHASHIMFounder, ShopGo, Syria / Jordan

Ghashim has implemented two structural changes since MEEP to reinvent the culture of ShopGo, a website where you can create your own e-commerce site in one click. “I’ve hired an academy manager,” he says. “We plan to grow a community around ShopGo’s product.” He has also brought advisers to “strengthen the company and balance the leader-investor relationship,” as well as to “assist in our search for high-profile investors.” Additionally, Moe has begun developing a major refugee-based philanthropic initiative, the details of which are still under wraps. “I will stay involved going forward,” he told us. “This program can be a life-changer.”

SEIZING HOPE


“This week gave us three key pillars. One, we got introduced to different business models, some of which will dramatically affect ours. Second, we got to know success stories, which adds motivation. And third, it gives us very good ideas about how to build an ecosystem in our part of the world.”

“You get the exposure in this program you’d get in six months or a year. … This is all about the entrepreneurship community. [Collaboration] is for the greater good of the region.”

AMIR BARSOUMFounder & CEO, DrBridge, Egypt

When Amir arrived at MEEP, DrBridge, a digital health care system that compiles patient medical records in order to automate data transactions between stakeholders, had been in operation for two and a half years and had 1,000 clients. Since MEEP, in just three months, 1,300 more doctors have signed up for DrBridge. Compared with his previous monthly growth rates, Barsoum says that DrBridge is experiencing 1,124 percent growth per month. Barsoum attributes this to the complete strategy change he embraced after his week in Silicon Valley. Specifically, Barsoum attributes his epiphany to the MEEP discussion at Uber on digital innovation—what he calls “the Great Uber Experience.” Barsoum outlined three other ways DrBridge has changed in light of MEEP conversations: first, a more vested interest in office culture; second, a greater emphasis on team-building; and third, a concerted effort to celebrate successes and victories inside the company. “We built a table-tennis table—I play more than my coworkers,” Barsoum says. The Institute looks forward to hosting him as a Spotlight Health scholar at the 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival.

“Square and Rally Health shared with us their visions and both the good and hard parts of business. There will be two major takeaways: to share best practices through visiting one another and to support one another in business. We will give more responsibility to young people—important work for us, as we are hiring a lot of people.”

MUJDAT AYOGUZFounder, Woisio, Turkey

“The networking exposure,” Ayoguz says, “has been the most effective part of this trip for me—both in the Bay Area and with fellow entrepreneurs.” Woisio is a social-media-based television platform that allows users to curate information streams by selecting tags that interest them. Through MEEP, it struck up a partnership with Kharabeesh’s Firas Al-Otaibi to feature its content on Woisio’s platform, which boasts 3.5 million monthly users. Following MEEP, Ayoguz also secured a meeting with Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers. And he says, “Connecting with local entrepreneurs to drive growth is an opportunity I will pursue.”

AMINE CHOUAIEB Founder, Chifco, Tunisia

Chifco is a customer-engagement platform that reinvents the way utilities, telecommunications companies, and facility managers interact with customers and devices. Since MEEP, Chouaieb was featured at the Investment and Entrepreneurship Conference and hosted by the US State Department, the American Chamber of Commerce in Tunisia, and the Aspen Institute. Chifco has also welcomed a consultant from Microsoft to their team for six months to strategize smart business growth. Chouaieb has been featured on Tunisie Radio to discuss program takeaways; he will also be publishing his program reflections in The Huffington Post.

THE INITIATIVE AND DISCIPLINE

OF MILITARY TRAINING CAN AND

DOES LEAD TO THE CREATION

OF ART. A NUMBER OF VETERAN-

ARTISTS AFFILIATED WITH THE

INSTITUTE SPEAK ABOUT HOW THEIR

EXPERIENCES IN THE MILITARY

HAVE SPARKED THEIR CREATIVITY—

AND HOW CREATIVITY HAS BEEN

ESSENTIAL TO MAKING SENSE OF WAR.

BY SACHA ZIMMERMAN

60


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no

Donley sings while Bloom accompanies him on piano.

61


I’m tired of telling war stories,” I say, not so much to Jenks as the empty bar behind him. We’re at a table in the corner, with a view of the entrance.

Jenks shrugs and makes a face. Hard to tell what it means. There’s so much scar tissue and wrinkled skin, I never know if he’s happy or sad or pissed or what. He’s got no hair and no ears either, so even though it’s been three years after he got hit, I still feel like his head is something I shouldn’t look at. But you look a man in the eye when you talk to him, so for Jenks I force my eyes in line with his.

“I don’t tell war stories,” he says, and takes a sip of his glass of water.

—Excerpt from Phil Klay’s Redeployment

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Klay


National Book Award–winner and Iraq War veteran Phil Klay is sitting forward in his chair onstage in Washington, DC, talking to an Institute audience about war.

“Do I have the right to tell these stories?” he asks. Klay is wrestling with what it means to write about war from different perspectives—to tell his characters’ stories even if they are not his own. Klay, a US Marine, shifts in his chair and settles on an answer. “Every character is me, and none of them are,” he says.

For many veterans, the military seems to fire a sense of internal purpose that can be isolating and depressing if left uncultivated. But directed toward specific ends, that purpose is revelatory. The initiative and discipline of military training can lead to the creation of art—a process that can even be therapeutic. A number of veteran-artists affiliated with the Institute have in the past months spoken about how their experiences in the military have sparked their creativity, or how creativity after service has been essential to making sense of war.

But in a culture that often reflexively lionizes the creative work that is engendered by war, entering the artistic space in a spirit of both authenticity and vulnerability can be tricky. Klay is now worried that readers might mistake his truth for the only truth. “Everyone has their own war,” he says. “No art is the defining war novel, war movie…”

The canon, of course, is rich. Books like All Quiet on the Western Front, The Naked and the Dead, and The Things They Carried made war disconcertingly intimate. These books dispatched with any chest-thumping romantic heroics and brought the reader into the gritty terrors and realities of a foxhole. Films like Das Boot, Apocalypse Now, and The Hurt Locker gave audiences a visual language through which to understand the brutalities of war. And songs like “Fortunate Son,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” and “What’s Going On?” gave voice to the unavoidable politics of any war.

“War as art is inherently political,” Klay acknowledges. “It’s about our decisions on the ground. But everyone may react differently to the work.” One man’s freedom fighter, after all, is another’s insurgent. Klay himself reacts differently to his own work than some might expect. He says writing Redeployment was not the cathartic experience people often want him to say it was.

“Writing a book after service was not a goal,” he says. “I was not traumatized. Writing the book angered me. I wanted to do it, felt I had to do it. But is that healing or not?”

It was Klay’s second appearance at an Institute event in a year—a year in which the intersection of art and war became a theme, threading through the words of speakers at major Institute events while the nation tried to end its longest war, Afghanistan. The effects of the September 11 attacks continue to reverberate

in many forms of art and across cultures—from Ground Zero in one of the most famous cities in the world to the craggy peaks of Kandahar.

US Marine Timothy Donley deployed to Helman Province in January 2012—but his in-country service lasted just one month. In February, a roadside improvised-explosive device tore Donley down while he was on patrol. He lost both legs. A long and painful recovery awaited him at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. And that is where Donley discovered art—or, rather, art discovered him.

Donley sings in the Wounded Warrior Band, part of the MusiCorps program at Walter Reed, which gives severely recovering veterans an opportunity to enter conservatory-style musical training.

“It takes guys who never picked up an instrument before in their lives, and three months later are really good—I mean really good,” Donley told an audience at the Ida K. Lang Recital Hall at Hunter College in New York City this February as part of the Institute’s Arts Program event “Art in the Aftermath of War.”

It turns out, if you combine the rigor and work ethic of a soldier with a lot of downtime and a desire to quell the lethargy, and you

channel it into music, the results are stunning. Having a goal to focus on—and something to achieve—Donley said, brought “life back into people’s eyes.”

Arthur Bloom, who also participated in the event, agreed. An Aspen Ideas Festival regular and 2014 CNN Hero awardee, Bloom founded MusiCorps in 2007 to help veterans pass the time during painful recoveries; what he found was a group of particularly disciplined and motivated students. Now Bloom, a graduate of the Yale School of Music, teaches participants to practice classical technique in a conservatory style.

“Some of what we do, you could call adaptive music-making,” Bloom told the New York crowd. “The folks who are missing limbs or have damaged hands

and arms sometimes require specialized instruments, which we provide.” And when this happens, the veterans’ moods improve, they are more engaged, and they excel artistically.

Bloom had stumbled upon what Dr. Iva Fattorini has called “the latent therapeutic power of the arts.” As an Institute Spotlight Health speaker last summer, Fattorini called for merging the arts and medicine globally with the highest professional artistic standards. Fattorini is chair of the Cleveland Clinic Arts and Medicine Institute, which she founded in 2006, serving as its first executive director. Fattorini says hospitals need to provide more than just basic medical treatment.

“Neuroimmunology teaches us that extensive bidirectional communication takes place between the nervous and the immune systems in both health and disease,” Fattorini said. Thus, “if arts

“Writing a book after service was not a goal. I wanted to do it, felt I had to do it. But is that healing or not?”

Donley, Yo-Yo Ma


affect emotions, and emotions affect health, then arts affect health.”According to Fattorini, when a person faces a life-threatening crisis,

there is a level of self-reflection that is stronger than if they were not being forced to encounter their own mortality. Fattorini believes that these moments of crisis are critical—moments when patients should be exposed to fine art. Studies, she said, have shown that integrating arts and medicine improves health outcomes and quality of life. And a Cleveland Clinic study showed that music therapy decreased levels of anxiety, pain, and depression. In other words, with art, “a patient’s complete being is attended to while they are in the hospital.”

At the New York event, Donley performed blues-folk legend Buddy Miller’s “Wide River to Cross,” accompanied by Bloom on piano. Donley sang the elegiac chords—“There’s a sorrow in the wind/Blowing down the road I’ve been/I can hear it cry while shadows steal the sun”—as the audience sat rapt.

Bloom said his work is perhaps best captured in the words of one wounded veteran: “Through music we’re able to be heroic again.”

When Christopher Michel was in the middle of his Henry Crown Fellowship, in 2006, America was in the middle of two wars. A former

“Man versus nature is always compelling, I go to all sorts of interesting places and meet interesting people. Pictures connect me to other people.”

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Michel aboard a U-2 spy plane at 70,000 feet.

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US Naval flight officer, Michel had been an active-duty navigator, tactical coordinator, and mission commander aboard the P-3C Orion aircraft. What’s more, the Aspen Global Leadership Network Fellow had already founded Military.com—an online portal for service members, veterans, and their families—and written The Military Advantage: A Comprehensive Guide to Your Military & Veterans Benefits (Simon & Schuster). When it came time to start an AGLN Leadership Project, Michel continued this work in a new way: ReconnectAmerica.com tackled the growing gap between American civilians and military service men and women.

Sometimes a quick “Thank you for your service” as we breeze through a busy airport is as close as many Americans come to connecting with military personnel. Starting in 2006, Michel endeavored to bridge that chasm by launching a media program that featured a new military charity each month to help connect Americans at all levels of society with service members. He then promoted “ReconnectAmerica.com” on the Discovery Channel and Military.com.

“You don’t fight forces,” Michel tells The Aspen Idea. “You use them.” It was the kind of project, Michel says, where you don’t ask for money. Instead you ask for ad space and production facilities: “It’s easy for them to do that.”

In 2008, when Michel sold his company Affinity Labs to Monster Worldwide, he was at what Institute Fellows call “an inflection point.” Having flown over Bosnia in the 1990s, Michel had developed an acute sense of adventure. He also found the military to be unexpectedly creative. “In the military, you create, create, create,” he says. Klay describes it this way: “It’s not that you feel most alive; it’s that you feel most utilized.”

Michel longed to travel to extreme environments and to create something, but for what purpose?

“The camera is like a magic carpet,” Michel says. The onetime Naval officer, Pentagon aide, writer, and entrepreneur had found his new passion: photography, “a complete addiction.”

“I take pictures now because you can’t go back in time,” he says, a bit wistful that he never took photos when he was on active duty. “Your average moment could be an above-average memory.”

And like Klay and Donley, Michel’s inner drive yielded art. He is now a prolific professional photographer who specializes in shooting extreme environments. His most recent trip this spring was to the North Pole aboard a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker. “Man versus nature is always compelling,” he says. “I go to all sorts of interesting places and meet interesting people. Pictures connect me to other people.”

Back in Washington, DC, Klay has come to the same conclusion. “Art is a place where people can come together to talk about issues that are meaningful to them,” he tells the crowd. And if writing Redeployment was not as healing for him as Donley’s music curriculum, it certainly was meaningful.

“We have a responsibility to the vets who are coming back to our communities,” Klay says. “It has political consequences and interpersonal consequences if we assume that this one aspect of human experience forever alienates you from mankind, and I don’t like that idea.” Klay doesn’t want people to look away from the injured vet or just mutter, “Thank you for your service” in passing—unless, that is, it is the start of a real conversation. Like Michel, Klay wants to connect ordinary Americans with their nation’s military men and women.

“It was important not just to write a good story, but to communicate something,” Klay adds. “What we do overseas relates to what happens over here. These are all of our wars.”

Sacha Zimmerman is executive editor of The Aspen Idea. Top: A young man in Papua, New Guinea. Center: Aboard a naval aircraft carrier. Bottom: Old and new converge in Yangon, Burma.

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The 11 women in the ninth class of the Central America Leadership Initiative decided to build their own mentorship program for girls who could and should become leaders—but who have so few models of women leaders to look to that they seldom get the chance to dream.

By Caitlin Colegrove

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“As a child, I was vulnerable,” explains Maura Zapata, a 26-year-old attorney, as she recounts her formative years in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua. “My family had scarce resources, my father was a farmer, and my mother sold goods door to door. I was the youngest of six. It was school that helped me identify my leadership potential and develop the critical thinking that led me to my profession.”

After graduating from law school in Managua, Nicaragua, Zapata wanted to repay her school and community for the extraordinary opportunities she had received. Her hope was to give back by mentoring young girls and empowering them to take control of their futures. While she found a steady supply of worthy NGOs and causes around her, she struggled to find an opportunity

that would allow her to work directly with young girls. When she learned about the Soy Una Niña y Construyo mi Futuro (I Am a Girl, I Build My Future) program, she knew she had found the perfect opportunity to become a mentor.

The program was conceived by the 11 women who together comprise the female contingent of the ninth class of Central America Leadership Initiative Fellows. Like Zapata, the other Fellows recognized the combination of luck and circumstances that allowed them to advance in life, and they felt a responsibility to help the next generation. As CALI Fellow Denise Vargas, the commercial manager for Ultramotor and Motomundo, the leading motorcycle-distribution companies in Honduras, puts it, “Deeply

Soy Una Niña y Construyo mi Futuro (I Am a Girl, I Build My Future) helps 1,000 girls across six Central American countries.

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rooted in our hearts is our concern for the future of so many vulnerable girls in our countries.”

CALI was founded in 2005 by two Henry Crown Fellows, one of the 13 programs in the Aspen Global Leadership Network, a worldwide community of more than 2,000 action-oriented leaders committed to making the world a better place. Fellows are selected in groups of 20 to be part of one of 13 geographic or sector-specific initiatives around the world, each modeled after the Henry Crown Fellowship Program. The 20 Fellows enter the experience having demonstrated a great deal of personal success and leave it inspired to make a greater mark on their communities and the world.

The development of I Am a Girl, I Build My Future began in March 2014 with leaders from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panamá seated around a table in Managua—the second in a series of four seminars in which each class of AGLN Fellows participates. (The second of the four seminars is always a classic Aspen Seminar.) The group of 24 men and women, CALI’s ninth class, were engrossed in a discussion of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex—so much so that they decided to name themselves the RadiCALI class.

“I was the youngest of six. It was school that helped me identify my

leadership potential and develop the critical thinking that led me to my profession.”

The program started after the CALI Fellows read Simone de Beauvoir.

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Karla Blanco, the corporate-affairs director for Intel in Costa Rica, stopped and read one sentence aloud: “For the individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honored with the name of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences, and no woman has ever believed herself authorized to do this.” Though the CALI Fellows didn’t realize it at the time, this moment would mark the beginning of a major regional initiative on women and girls. “As proven leaders selected to be part of this selective fellowship program,” says Maria Isabel Mayorga, the executive director of Fundación Gedeón, which works to improve civic engagement in Guatemala City, “I had a moment where I looked around the room and realized I was among the most privileged in my country. My CALI classmates and I share a sense of responsibility for supporting the next generation.”

The 11 women in the class left the seminar resolved to do more for women and girls in their countries. A spirited WhatsApp group text discussion just a few weeks later helped give shape to what the women wanted to do. “The original idea for the specific regional program,” Denise Vargas says, “came from a discussion about the mixed messages our children, and particularly girls, receive through media, merchandise, and role models.”

Armed with a concept for a major regional mentoring program focused on empowering girls, Ana Margarita Vijil—a Fulbright scholar and president of the Sandinista Renovation Movement, a center-left political party in Nicaragua—focused on fundraising. She proposed that the RadiCALI women apply to the US State Department’s Alumni Exchange Innovation Fund. Via online communication, the women worked on the grant application as a team for two weeks in April. In June, the State Department announced that the women had been selected from hundreds of programs for a $23,000 grant. The gift would allow I Am a Girl, I Build My Future to reach 1,000 girls in the six countries of Central America in their first year of operations.

Buoyed by their seed funding and this vote of confidence, the women met in Guatemala City in July and invited Fellows from previous CALI classes to join them. Maria Pacheco, a fellow of the second class and a John P. McNulty Prize laureate, introduced them to a methodology called Abriendo Oportunidades (Opening Opportunities), which was developed by Vital Voices Guatemala and the Population Council.

With the program established and start-up funds raised, the Feinstein

“The original idea for the specific regional program came from a discussion about the mixed messages our children, and particularly girls, receive through media,

merchandise, and role models.”

The State Department awarded I Am A Girl a $23,000 grant—the program beat out hundreds of applicants for the honor.

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group now knew that the biggest hurdle to scaling their project throughout the region would be capacity. To build that, they needed support and connections. They quickly found both in the CALI network of Fellows. Glasswing International, founded by CALI Fellow Diego de Sola, offered them access to its robust network of volunteers and infrastructure in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Meanwhile, in Costa Rica, the education NGO Fe y Alegría (Faith and Happiness) and the CEPIA Association, both founded by CALI Fellow Laetitia Deweer, offered their local networks as well.

Meanwhile, the RadiCALI women had been hard at work selecting mentors—each carefully chosen for their blend of life experience and professional achievement. In February, the Population Council invited all I Am a Girl, I Build My Future mentors to Guatemala for training in nine methodologies it had developed in areas like self-esteem, resource management, financial literacy, sexual and reproductive health, and identifying and preventing violence—topics girls are seldom educated in.

With eager mentors like Maura newly graduated from training sessions, the Girls Clubs officially launched in April in each of the six countries. Mentors lead weekly meetings in a safe space. The

girls who attend are between the ages of eight and 15. Maura has already mentored 50 girls who grew up in the same conditions she did and are, as she was at that age, vulnerable.

The RadiCALI women have formed the sort of bond we regularly see in classes of AGLN Fellows around the world. They regularly test each others’ views about their roles as mothers, partners, leaders, and friends. From an initial spark of collaboration among classmates to a major regional program, I Am A Girl, I Build My Future is now poised to make a difference in the futures of many vulnerable girls throughout Central America. “It has been wonderful to witness each of the women’s leadership emerge when most needed,” Maria Isabel Mayorga, an NGO leader from Guatemala, explains, “and then take a backseat when not. Our project has taken shape without organizational structure and without formality—just through passion, respect, and love. I believe this dynamic is the best evidence of what true fellowship means and its power to change the world through a shared vision and selflessness.”

Caitlin Colegrove is network and communications manager for the Aspen Global Leadership Network.

“Our project has taken shape without organizational structure and without formality—just passion, respect, and love. I believe this dynamic is the best evidence of

what true fellowship means.”

The girls learn about self-esteem, finance, and reproductive health—topics girls are seldom educated in.

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72 THE MORAL IMPERATIVES TO FOOD SECURITY The scale of global food insecurity is unprecedented. How do we feed the world? Madeleine Albright, Tom Daschle, and Dan Glickman on what needs to happen now.

78 BRINGING HEALTH CARE TO TRIBES THAT NEED IT After years of poor dental care, if any, Native youth took matters into their own hands—only to find unexpected resistance. The Center for Native American Youth’s Erin Bailey explains why.

84 REBUILDING LIVES, REDUCING COSTS A new model for jobs vs. jail has investors betting prison reform will work. ImpactAlpha’s David Bank and Jessica Pothering say why it’s a good bet.

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THEASPENJOURNAL IDEAS


It is peculiar to live in a world where hunger is an endemic problem for half the planet while diet books are best-sellers in the other half. This point is often lost in the broader bundle of jargon that now defines the conversation on food security in the 21st century, but it should not be.

A food security expert today will tell you that in order to feed the world’s population, projected to reach nine billion people by 2050, we must adopt a sophisticated strategy of “streamlining market efficiencies,” “scaling best practices,” and “leveraging disruptive technologies” to put food in the mouths of the poor and the hungry. True. But there is more to this story.

In reality, food insecurity predates public-private partnerships and market-driven solutions by several millennia, and the essence of the issue remains unchanged. Even in the 21st century, chronic hunger and malnutrition are propagated by two forces: inequality and injustice.

This means that food security is as much a moral and political issue as it is one defined by markets and international agreements. Accordingly, we have an obligation to make the case for plugging the gaps in the global food system—not only because of how it will benefit economic growth and political stability but also because it is the right thing to do.

It is therefore time for a clear-eyed moral framework for reaching food security. This means building support among core participants—governments, the private sector, NGOs, and international institutions—for the principle that feeding the world’s growing population is an end in itself and not merely a means to other ends. Generating returns on investment, exploring new markets, and protecting the world’s resources are important benefits that will come from working toward food security. But they

are a small part of a greater moral good that should remain the fundamental principle of food security. What does this principle look like in practice?

Government is first and foremost a social contract that outlines responsibilities for order and well-being between those who rule and those who are ruled. I therefore believe that governments have a responsibility to feed those who cannot feed themselves. But we must better understand what tools governments can use to achieve that objective.

First, property is everywhere in this discussion, and governments have the power to define the legal architecture of property rights. Food is about agriculture; agriculture is about land and water; and land and water are about property—who owns it, who has access to it, and who cultivates it. As the economist Hernando De Soto has pointed out brilliantly, if we can do a better job of making property rights accessible to all, we can also help the poor to use those rights to obtain credit, make investments, and increase their agricultural output. Property rights give poor people a stronger voice and a greater stake in their economies. We cannot expect to increase the agricultural output of the world’s arable land if the smallholder farmers responsible for its cultivation are not invested in its future.

Second, as the providers of social services, governments are in a unique position to structure how issues such as nutrition, agriculture, and infrastructure intersect with welfare and social services. One of the resounding lessons from the work of the Food Security Strategy Group at the Aspen Institute is that an integrated approach for reducing food insecurity has a greater impact than separate strategies for each sector. Ethiopia has demonstrated the wisdom of such an integrated strategy in its Agricultural Transformation Agency, a forward-thinking agency designed to

BY MADELEINE ALBRIGHT

Food should be a human right. Resolving hunger is a matter of justice and equality—which puts it squarely

in the camp of governments and spiritual leaders. Businesses, too, stand to profit from increasing

food access—they have the largest stake in improving it.

THE MORAL IMPERATIVES OF

FOOD SECURITY


reduce food insecurity by mandating collaboration between key government ministries and finance, agriculture, health, relief, and social services. The success of this model is evident in the fact that since the strategy’s implementation, Ethiopia has made greater gains toward food security than any other country, as measured by the DuPont Global Food Security Index.

Third, governments have the power and responsibility to create clear regulatory environments to accelerate technologies that support safe and sustainable agricultural production increases. One important opportunity will come later this year, when the United Nations sets out its post-2015 development goals. Part of the discussion about the proper role of the UN in food security should include whether we consider access to food a human right. Importantly, this could help reframe the debate on hot-button moral issues, such as agricultural subsidies and genetically modified (GM) seeds.

The green revolutions and their modern-day counterparts have saved countless lives. Yet there are countries with starving populations that for a variety of reasons have decided they will not use any crops that have been exposed to GMs or are themselves genetically modified. Consensus in the scientific community supports the position that GM crops increase yields and do not pose a threat to human health. While this position could shift, until that happens we have a moral imperative to use these agricultural innovations to decrease hunger and increase profits for farmers in the developing world. Only governments have the authority to drive evidence-based policy reforms that decrease hunger, enhance nutrition, and support innovation.

From the legal architecture of land and water rights to the provision of social services and the power to shape and accelerate high-impact technologies, governments possess considerable tools to deploy in the global effort to fight food insecurity. Moreover, as the guardians of social order and justice, governments have a compelling moral responsibility to lead the way toward a more food-secure future.

But governments can’t do this alone. Governments are not omnipotent, nor do they possess infinite resources. The two sectors best positioned to complement the tools and capabilities of governments are the private sector and what we may consider the “spiritual” sector, or global religions.

Businesses, of course, have the greatest stake in achieving a food-secure future. And it is here that the moral underpinning of food security becomes particularly important. Businesses, including large multinational agriculture companies, stand to gain a great deal in the markets that now exemplify the most endemic and vexing challenges of food insecurity. Yet the path to profitability in those regions is not always confluent with the long-term sustainability and welfare of the most vulnerable communities.

Businesses have a responsibility to share the burden: to do well by doing good. In the agriculture sector, this means making a commitment to developing resources and human capital at a community level so that smallholder farmers, who are mostly women, share the profits of the global rise in agriculture yields by having fair access to water, land, and fertilizers.

Even with the public, private, and nonprofit sectors fully engaged, it’s in our interests to recognize that another set of voices can mobilize grassroots action on an issue such as food security in a way no other organizations can. These are the voices of religious authority—from the Pope to imams, and everyone in between—who have the power to spur broad-based action on agriculture and nutrition to help the poor and malnourished.

Notably, Pope Francis and his deputy, Cardinal Peter Turkson, have been outspoken on this issue, with Pope Francis going so far as to call it a “God-given right of everyone to have access to adequate food.” Moreover, they have mobilized the Church’s development

arm, Caritas Internationalis, in a global campaign to end hunger by 2025 by leveraging for the first time the worldwide footprint of Caritas Internationalis and its affiliated organizations to present a unified call for systemic change in the global food system.

The Pope’s voice and action on this issue, as evidenced by his strong endorsement of the Rome Declaration on Nutrition and Framework for Action, exemplifies

how religious leaders can use their gravitas and authority to galvanize support for public-sector-led initiatives.

Meeting the complex challenge of achieving food security by mid-century mandates new thinking and action. Yes, it requires “dynamic partnerships,” “models for scalable impact,” and “disruptive technologies,” along with a host of other ingredients that would be dizzying to list. But the real challenge is to use the core competencies of each sector to pursue a common goal. Businesses make money—they must find it in their interests to grow in a way that leaves the poor and malnourished better off in the areas in which they work. Governments make laws and uphold order—they must see protecting the poor and malnourished as fundamental to social and political stability over the long term. Religions and other NGOs—such as those focused on empowering women—can share compelling narratives and motivate people to give back, cut back, and reduce food waste. In a world where one-third of all edible food never makes it to the mouths of the hungry, we all have an individual moral responsibility to do our part. The imperative to support those in need is the idea—the larger framework—that unites each of these sectors in achieving food security. We should embrace this sense of shared purpose.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright is the co-chair of the Aspen Institute Food Security Strategy Group with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, and the philanthropists Tony Elumelu and Javier Solana.

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“As the guardians of social order and justice,

governments have a compelling moral

responsibility to lead the way toward a more food-secure future.”


More important, food production must meet that demand sustainably and equitably, with respect for the environment and the smallholder farmers that make up the backbone of global agriculture. This is no easy task.

Like many of the greatest challenges facing world leaders today, achieving food security—defined as when all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to stay healthy and active—over the long term requires tight coordination and progress across all sectors. Governments, NGOs, international organizations, and corporations all have a role to play. But who will lead? And where can we focus our resources to make the greatest impact?

Reflecting on our long and shared experience tackling these issues in government, informed by the storied history of farming in our home states and across America, and fueled by the powerful data and evidence on global agriculture markets and innovation, we

believe the private sector can provide the greatest improvements in food security. Governments, NGOs, and international organizations must thus not only cultivate values-based leadership in the business community but also empower those leaders in both business and politics who recognize the private sector’s unique potential to meet one of the most pressing challenges of this century.

According to the FAO, global trade in agriculture exceeds $1 trillion each year, or more than 200 times the annual operating budget of the World Food Programme, the world’s largest food aid organization. To put that in perspective, a 1 percent per year gain in the efficiency of global agriculture markets would alone free up enough money to cover all global food aid costs many times over.

The private sector, then, is poised to be the engine for driving sustainability in agriculture and natural resource use over the next 30 years. How? By reinvesting capital in sustainable supply chains, developing nutrient-rich and high-yield crops, creating innovative financial products that increase smallholder farmers’ access to financing, and developing country-level cooperatives.

To take just one example, efficiency gains in crop development hold enormous potential. As data-driven philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates outlined in their 2015 annual foundation letter, “American farmers get five times as much maize from their land as African farmers do.” Investment to enhance the efficiency and resilience of Africa’s agriculture sector is a no-brainer—a down payment on the future food security of a continent that, despite its incredible resource potential, continues to spend $50 billion each year to import food.

The history of cooperatives and the agriculture industry offer another example, and one where the history of the United States can point the way for the future. Both the United States and developing countries show us how investment in disaggregated agricultural markets not only pays dividends to shareholders but also increases sustainability over the long term. The growth of cooperatives was in fact one of the most significant factors in US agriculture’s rapid rise over

FOOD SECURITY:WHO LEADS?

The short answer: everyone. Governments can set important agendas. But the private sector holds

the keys to getting more people better food.

The world is facing a food security challenge of unprecedented scale in the 21st century. The numbers are familiar, and they are stark: food production, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, must increase by at least 60 percent in the next 35 years to feed Earth’s growing and hungry population. And food production must meet that rising demand while contending with other crises like climate change, migration, conflict, and disease, which will all affect our ability to grow more food.

BY TOM DASCHLE AND DAN GLICKMAN


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the past century, combined with government investment in infrastructure like roads and rail, and investment in market-pricing frameworks like the commodities trade.

Cooperatives help farmers get access to the financing they need for growth. The private sector has a significant role to play in bringing small farmers together. Because of cooperatives, today’s agribusinesses can increase crop yields while bolstering food quality and the stability of international trade. The Minnesota-based dairy company Land O’ Lakes, for example, has been organizing and strengthening cooperatives in developing countries and increasing farmers’ access to improved seed and animals while also providing education in effective production and economic management.

Harnessing market forces will be necessary to double world food production by 2050. But more than mastering the market is necessary to achieve growth the way it should be done. That will require a dedication to socially and environmentally sustainable investment principles. And it will require corporate leadership that puts a high value on the nutritional quality of food, a sustainable food supply, the sensible use of water, and working to ensure climate security.

Using the power of its supply chains to affect change, the Coca-Cola Company is setting a notable example through its sustainable-sourcing strategies, empowerment of women and smallholder farmers, and protections of local land rights. By the end of the decade, the company will have spent $17 billion in Africa developing new manufacturing lines, installing cooling and distribution equipment, implementing safe-water initiatives, and supporting women’s economic empowerment and community well-being.

The quality and not just quantity of food—its nutritional value—is inextricably linked to global food security. On a planet where one-in-nine people is undernourished and more than 1.4 billion people are overweight or obese, the private sector must prioritize “sustainable calories” and recognize that the return on investment in nutritious food will deliver greater value over time. DuPont’s Nutrition and Health division collaborates with the public and private sectors to develop science-based food-ingredient and food-protection solutions that improve the health profile, quality, and safety of food. The Global Food Security Index, a unique and progressive collaboration between DuPont and the Economist Intelligence Unit, is an important step in bringing nutrition food security planning to the

forefront. The index measures food security across 109 countries based on 28 indicators, including diet diversification, protein quality, nutrition standards, food waste, and obesity. Each of these indicators is critical to addressing the global challenge of malnutrition.

Climate change is also an inextricable part of food security, and here the reinsurance industry has been taking the lead in addressing risks from extreme weather such as floods and droughts. Swiss Re has created new insurance products that protect companies’ weather-related earnings and prevent losses from weather and commodity price shocks. The company has also developed new types of crop-shortfall insurance, weather-based index coverage, and structured price hedges for businesses concerned about possible low production resulting from unpredictable weather.

With all of this potential, what models of private leadership should be promoted as setting the gold standard? How should corporations engage with governments and NGOs working on food security issues? In the future, categorizing this type of work under the umbrella term “public-private partnerships” will be insufficient as a guide for change. We believe that clearer conceptions for what enlightened private-sector approaches look like must be discussed and established.

Food security conversations today need to build from an understanding of initiatives like the ones now happening on the ground. There is broad agreement on the need for sustainable intensification of agriculture in order to increase both yields and nutritional quality of crops—and to consolidate and empower smallholder farmers, particularly women farmers, to increase their economic power and improve their access to the global food trade. How this will happen—and what kinds of private-sector investments will be needed to make it happen—is the great puzzle of the day. Our job is to help fit together the puzzle pieces of private-sector leadership to ensure the globe’s long-term food security.

Madeleine Albright, Tom Daschle, and Dan Glickman serve as co-chairs of the Institute’s Food Security Strategy Group, along with philanthropists Tony Elumelu and Javier Solana. Madeleine Albright, Institute Trustee and chair of Albright Stonebridge Group, previously served as the 64th US secretary of state. Tom Daschle, currently a policy adviser, was the Senate majority leader. Dan Glickman is the executive director of the Aspen Institute Congressional Program as well as a former US secretary of agriculture and member of the US House of Representatives.

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Every day at noon, the Institute’s Journal of Ideas posts the FIVE BEST IDEAS OF THE DAY, taken from all over the web. Here are 20 provocative, new ideas, many of them by Institute contributors, that appeared recently. You’ll find the links at www.aspen.us.

TWENTYBEST IDEAS

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How do you frighten political strongmen? Teach journalism.Thomas Fiedler in The Conversation

Add kids’ football to the list of cultural dividers in America. David Leonhardt in The Upshot

It’s time to pay college athletes.Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Jacobin

Hacking out of prison: San Quentin inmates are learning to code.Charley Locke in EdSurge

Solar power can provide hot meals for the masses.José Andrés in The Plate

It’s time to build a more secure internet.Walter Isaacson in Time

Juries are getting virtual reality headsets to ‘visit’ crime scenes.Jessica Hamzelou in New Scientist

ISIS is bringing recruits onto the battlefield faster than we can kill them.Tim Mack & Nancy A. Youssef in The Daily Beast

One NGO is crowdfunding the fight against human trafficking.Leif Coorlim at the CNN Freedom Project

Better than an action movie: Catch a college lecture on your next commercial flight.Kim Clark in Money

Our high incarceration rate no longer reduces crime.Lauren-Brooke Eisen in USA Today

The U.S. wants to hack your phone because it doesn’t have the real spies it needs.Patrick G. Eddington in Reuters

For developmentally disabled kids, the benefits of organized sports are huge.Darrin Steele in Quartz

How do we convince Americans that justice isn’t for sale — when in 39 states, it is?Sue Bell Cobb in Politico

For some returning from war, a ‘G.I. bill for farming’ eases the transition home.Abby Wendle in Harvest Public Media

Just because we’re able to edit the DNA of tomorrow’s children, does that mean we should?Antonio Regalado in MIT Technology Review

Blue-collar jobs are coming back, and pay well. But women are missing out.Mitchell Hartman in Marketplace

It’s time to give up the uniquely American institution of the network anchorman.Frank Rich in New York magazine

Go ahead and start a new career in your fifties. It’s easier than you think.Donna Rosato in Money

We know how to reduce earthquake deaths. So why aren’t we doing it?Brad Plumer in Vox


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BY ERIN BAILEY

BRINGINGHEALTH CARETO TRIBES THAT NEED IT

Native youth are bringing national attention to an innovative program pioneered by leaders from

Alaska Tribal Nations to bring oral health care to communities that have had no access to it—and succeeding in the face

of strong opposition by dental trade associations.

Littlebear Sanchez, 22, a foster youth from the Mescalero Apache Nation, suffered from a broken and infected tooth for many months, unable to get a dentist appointment in New Mexico. “As the pain became unbearable,” Littlebear recalls, “I even tried pulling the tooth out myself.” He has shared his story with White House staff, members of the president’s Cabinet, and media out-lets to raise awareness of the importance of access to safe health care and to advocate for policy change.

Alayna Eagle Shield, 24, from the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, testified during a North Dakota state legislative hearing in October 2014 about the use of dental therapy, and she wrote an op-ed shar-ing her stories of long, early morning trips across a winter prairie for the chance to see a dentist. According to Alayna, only a lucky few can be seen each day, so “many of our youth grow up with missing teeth.” As an aspiring medical student, Alayna is deter-mined to ensure that Indian tribes and rural communities can end the status quo and bring back good health.

As an organization committed to youth leadership and develop-ment, the Center for Native American Youth creates opportunities that bolster youth initiatives and lift up their voices. CNAY was founded in 2011 as a policy program at the Institute by former US Senator Byron Dorgan with $1 million from excess campaign

funds. The organization is dedicated to improving the health, safe-ty, and overall well-being of Native American youth through com-munication, policy development, and advocacy on a national level. Alayna and Littlebear are examples of that advocacy.

Centuries of failed policies and chronic underfunding of pro-grams intended to serve Native Americans have led to intolerable disparities in health, socioeconomic status, housing, education, and other social determinants of health, seriously affecting the ability of Native American youth to reach their full potential.

That includes oral health. For Native American youth, lack of access to oral health care persists as a very real and sometimes deadly cause of poor health outcomes, pain, and grief: 72 percent of Native youth nationwide currently suffer from untreated tooth decay—double the rate of the general population. For children ages two to four, the rate is five times the US average. Nearly 50 percent of Native youth in the United States live in federally des-ignated dental-shortage areas. All too often, medical help is hours away.

The Indian Health Service, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services whose mission is to carry out the federal government’s responsibility to provide health care to Na-tive Americans, remains chronically underfunded, with less fund-


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“What I’ve learned from this program and working with these incredible providers is sometimes you have to do

something because it’s hard. If you don’t, nobody else will. This is about real kids who need real dental care. In one generation,

we’ve made change.”

ing for health care services per capita than veterans and prisoners, not to mention Medicaid and Medicare patients. One of the re-sults of historic underfunding and potential future budget cuts is a dentist vacancy rate hovering around 30 percent.

Ten years ago, Alaska Native tribes and leaders designed a solu-tion to the high rates of tooth decay in their children. They had tried what many tribal communities had tried before—to lure den-tists to remote areas with lucrative employment packages and loan-payback models. Unfortunately, these efforts failed. So the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, a not-for-profit health organiza-tion led by Alaska Native leaders, looked outside the Indian health system for innovative solutions to the growing rates of tooth decay in Alaska Native villages.

Ultimately, ANTHC brought innovative oral health care to their communities through dental therapists, mid-level providers who supply evidence-based care in more than 50 countries—but, until recently, not in the United States. Sometimes compared with nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants, dental therapists serve as an addition, not a replacement, to a dentist-led team. Although supervised by a dentist, dental therapists do not have to be in the same location, allowing them to reach more people in need. Den-tal therapists are thoroughly trained in pediatric care, which makes up 60 percent of their work, and acquire cutting-edge skills, in-cluding motivational interviewing, to better interact with families and children.

This trailblazing program, the first of its kind in the United States, increased access for 45,000 Alaska Natives in ten years. In-stead of seeing a dentist every couple of years—if at all—Alaska Natives now have access to continuous care from dental therapists who use airplanes, boats, and snowmobiles to reach them. For the first time in more than a century, Alaska’s Native communities are seeing cavity-free children. Unlike the dentists who needed to be attracted to rural areas, the majority of dental therapists grow up

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in the communities they serve, and thus understand residents’ chal-lenges, norms, and culture. With a strong education and service to community, dental therapists become important local leaders.

Yet restoring the oral health of Alaska Natives has reopened longstanding policy issues and complex relationships among tribes, states, and the federal government. Organized dentistry disapproved of ANTHC’s solution. That opposition includes the American Dental Association, which has long opposed mid-level dental providers and which unsuccessfully sued the Alaska Native tribes as well as the original class of individual dental therapists.

“What I’ve learned from this program and working with these incredible providers is sometimes you have to do something be-cause it’s hard. If you don’t, nobody else will,” says Valerie Da-vidson, a Yup’ik Native and a former senior director of legal and intergovernmental affairs at ANTHC who successfully defended Alaska Tribal Nations in allowing the program to continue. “This is about real kids who need real dental care. In one generation, we’ve made change.”

Despite opposition, the program has gained national attention, and not just in Tribal Nations. Many communities, especially in rural America, suffer from a lack of access to dental providers: 77

percent of all US counties include designated dental care short-age areas. Simply not enough dentists serve rural and low-income areas. That’s why Indian tribes, tribal organizations, and states are looking to dental therapy for needed change.

Currently, two states have passed legislation authorizing the use of dental-therapy providers, and nearly 26 states are exploring use of dental therapists. But the issue remains contentious, and the ADA and its state affiliates continue to flex their lobbying power in opposing the expansion of dental therapy.

Native youth play a fundamental role in pushing past opposi-tion and in designing a healthy future for their communities. Youth change the conversation; their stories hold us accountable. Their stories matter. Native youth need and deserve quality medical care—not losing family members from abscessed teeth, traveling long hours for a chance to obtain treatment, or trying to pull their own teeth to end pain. Tribal Nations were first in developing den-tal therapy in the United States. They—and their youth—are lead-ing the way for all communities.

Erin Bailey is the executive director of the Institute’s Center for Native American Youth.


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ON AMERICA, TORTURE REVELATIONS AND OUR FOREIGN POLICY: A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID IGNATIUSIt’ll be some time before CIA officers will undertake activities that they believe are not going to have long-term public support. And I think that’s one of the delicate issues. The CIA is like the military. When people receive an order from their commander to go do something, if the response is “let me talk to my lawyer,” that’s not a good situation. I think the next president will have to worry — as President Obama realized he had to worry — about the morale. In this world, you need a quality intelligence service.

INSTITUTEDIGITAL

EXCERPTS

WHAT COULD BE LOST AS EINSTEIN’S PAPERS GO ONLINEBy Walter IsaacsonWith online archives, research can be crowdsourced. Students from Bangalore to Baton Rouge can drill down into Einstein’s papers and ferret out gems and connections that professional researchers may have missed. That will reinforce a basic truth about the digital age: By empowering everyone to get information unfiltered, it diminishes the role of gatekeepers and intermediaries. Scholars and experts will still play an important role in historical analysis, but their interpretations will be challenged and supplemented by the wisdom of crowds.

A GAME PLAN TO BREAK THE GRIDLOCKBy Jim Nussle and Peter OrszagA new Congress has been sworn in and our government is divided. A goal that both parties should share is to do a much better job of ensuring that scarce taxpayer dollars are invested in programs that work. That is why we have joined with current and former government leaders and advisors from across the political spectrum to call on our government to play Moneyball. By using data, evidence, and evaluation, we can improve government performance in the same way that Billy Beane famously revolutionized baseball. By playing Moneyball, government can provide better services to millions more Americans while saving billions of dollars.

REDUCING INEQUALITY: SIX NEXT MOVES FOR BUSINESSBy Maureen Conway and Judy Samuelson“Inequality” brings government regulation and public policy fixes to mind. But let’s face it — decisions about wages, benefits, work schedules, and skills reside largely in the business sector, which holds the key to expansion of the middle class. At the upper end of the scale are issues including runaway executive compensation, a significant contributor to the growth in wage inequality. What else then should be in the plans of chief executives who have read the same tea leaves about the cost to the commons of growing wage inequality? What are some solutions that lie within business itself ?

THE ASPEN JOURNAL OF IDEAS is a way to capture essays, conversations, and opinions from the leaders of the Institute community. The goal of the Journal, an online publication, is to highlight important ideas, flesh out innovative solutions to pressing issues, and to tell stories about good policy that will change lives. Here are just a few of the voices that appeared in the Journal in recent months.

VISIT ASPEN.US/JOURNAL EARLY AND OFTEN TO HEAR MORE.


BACK TO THE FUTURE: DEBATING A RESPONSE TO THE CRISIS WITH RUSSIA By Nicholas BurnsAs a long-time observer of the US-Russia relationship, I certainly believe this is the most consequential and worrisome US-Russia crisis since the end of the Soviet Empire. I was privileged to serve on the National Security Council staff at the White House from 1990 to 1995, and I remember distinctly the collective feeling of relief and even elation in Washington when the Cold War ended without a shot fired. Those were more optimistic days; we believed a new era of peaceful and even cooperative relations might be possible with the Russian people and government. Twenty-three years later, President Obama faces a very different challenge. Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and of Crimea and eastern Ukraine this year has suddenly produced new dividing lines in Europe. By intimidating and threatening Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and Armenia from even considering trade agreements with the European Union, Putin seeks to build a band of buffer states to the south and west of the Russian Federation to insulate his country from NATO and the European Union.

THE PROMISE OF UNIVERSAL COMMUNITY COLLEGEBy Josh WynerPresident Obama’s initiative to make the first two years of community college tuition-free represents an immense investment in the future of the nation. But as with all investments, those responsible for its returns should ensure that the unprecedented access it offers is not hollow — that the nine million students who could go to community college free actually learn, graduate, and attain the jobs and further education to which they aspire. We know it can be done. There are community colleges in our country, like South Dakota’s Lake Area Technical Institute, with graduation rates above 75 percent. Santa Fe College in Gainesville, Florida, sends more than half its students to four-year universities, and nearly two-thirds of those students go on to earn a bachelor’s degree. Graduates from Washington State’s Walla Walla Community College earn an average annual salary of $42,000 immediately after graduating, growing to $57,000 five years later. Combine results like these with the elimination of community college tuition and our nation can unleash a new era of innovation and economic growth--like universal high school did. Just imagine.

NEW LUDDITE FEARS ARE MISPLACED: IF NEW TECHNOLOGY REALLY CUT JOBS, WE’D ALL BE OUT OF WORK BY NOWBy Walter IsaacsonIf new technologies reduced the total number of jobs, we would all be out of work by now. But times of technological advance have been times of job creation. Last year, as whole new waves of robotic systems were introduced, the US added 3 million jobs. The unemployment rate hit a six-year low, and average hourly earnings for private sector workers rose. Be wary of those who lament the demise of jobs for checkout clerks and meter readers, as if preserving such jobs will lead to a healthier economy. This Luddite fallacy is based on a presumption that there is only a set amount of goods and services people want. If technology permits those things to be produced more efficiently, Luddites argue, there will be less work to do. In reality, technology leads to an increase in productivity and wealth. That in turn leads to increased demand for goods and services and thus more jobs, including ones in fields we can barely imagine.

TAKING A NATION TO WARBy Mickey EdwardsMany can legitimately point to potential hardships here if ISIL succeeds and much of the world’s oil supply is held hostage because America did too little to stop the advance of terror. Some will argue that by supporting uprisings against dictators who were maintaining Middle East stability, the United States bears some responsibility for the unraveling that has followed. None of these are inconsequential arguments. But a decision today to empower President Obama to bring our multiple resources to bear against ISIL need not preclude revisiting the issue in three years, or even sooner if Congress chooses. For now the best answer is to demand that those most threatened take the lead in protecting themselves—their countries and their lives—with the United States as a supporting ally. That’s the position I would advocate if I were still in Congress today. Whether or not that is the view that prevails, what matters is that the decision will be made by the peoples’ representatives, just as the Constitution requires.

NETPOLITIK: WHAT THE EMERGENCE OF NETWORKS MEANS FOR DIPLOMACY AND STATECRAFTBy Charlie Firestone and Leshuo DongNetpolitik is the optimization of the network form to engage in international affairs, particularly international communications. It overlays a network mentality on the more traditional approaches of realpolitik and international liberalism for greater effectiveness. That is, as world players think about how to get others to act in ways consistent with their interests and values, they need to be ever conscious of the network form as a means or a medium to achieve their goals. The world of diplomacy has moved from one of diplomats speaking candidly behind closed doors and cabling back to their ministries to a multidisciplinary business of influencing publics within countries via public diplomacy, for a government, or via a host of other categories—citizen diplomacy, cultural diplomacy, business diplomacy or fringe diplomacy—for a non-state actor. The formal or informal diplomats who succeed will be the ones who become part of the Net: active, transparent, respected members of the global community coordinating, encouraging and empowering others to act.


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Social impact bonds offer a new kind of philanthropic investment—initial risk for long-term returns if public-service programs save money. The Institute’s Ascend program, in partnership with the Program on Philanthropy and Social

Innovation, is tracking a number of innovative investments, with an especially close eye on one that helps ex-offenders in

New York find jobs faster and stay out of prison.

The snow was blowing, and it was in the 20s on Wall Street the day after New Year’s, but dozens of mostly young, mostly black, and mostly unemployed men showed up for job training and placements on the first working day of the year.

They were eager to enroll at the nonprofit Center for Employment Opportunities, better known as CEO, which operates out of the 18th floor of a building in the heart of New York City’s financial district. The men, all recently released from prison, were making an investment in their own futures. Other, more familiar, fixtures on Wall Street—including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers—are making an investment in the young men as well.

The ex-offenders lining up for employment help were among the first of 2,000 CEO clients in New York City and Rochester, whose job-training costs are covered under a “pay-for-success” contract financed by private investors. Bank of America Merrill Lynch offered the investment to its private banking clients, and between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve last year, more than 40 high-net-worth investors committed $13.5 million.

If enough of the formerly incarcerated men stay out of prison, the investors stand to recoup their principal, plus a return that can range between 5 and 12.5 percent. If CEO’s program fails to significantly reduce recidivism, with at least an 8 percent reduction in jail and prison days, investors will lose up to 90 percent of their money.

For investors, pay-for-success contracts, colloquially known as “social impact bonds,” might more accurately be called “repaid-

for-success.” Investors provide the upfront risk capital to finance preventive services and get their capital back, plus a financial return, out of the government’s avoided costs from a successful intervention. Social impact bonds are attractive to cash-strapped states and cities because lenders are obligated to pay only when results are proven and savings are realized.

The CEO contract was of particular interest to Ascend, a program at the Aspen Institute that was created in 2010 with a vision to help move low-income children and their parents toward educational success and economic security. Recognizing that ending the cycle of poverty requires leadership across all sectors, Ascend partnered with the Institute’s Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation to take an in-depth look at the field of impact investing as one tool that could help advance economic mobility for families. Ascend and PSI sought to find out what tools, strategies, and models could be distilled from impact investments that could lead to better results for children and families. They focused on the lessons and trends among investors making significant impact investments in education, economic security, and health and well-being. And they took an under-the-hood look at deals, because there is an imbalance between capital, which is more available, and the pipeline of deals ready for investment, which is underdeveloped.

In keeping with its mission to help all low-income families, Ascend is following the CEO deal to see what it can learn and share with its national network to strengthen programs and policies for families who have been involved in the justice system. Ascend has also tracked

BY DAVID BANK WITH JESSICA POTHERING

REDUCING COSTS BY REBUILDING LIVES


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the work of two other market-based approaches: Acelero Learning, a private-sector Head Start operator that is using data to close the achievement gap, and the Nurse-Family Partnership, which operates a pay-for-success contract to help low-income pregnant women avoid the hefty long-term financial and human costs of chronic poverty and poor health. Leaders from both organizations have been selected for the Ascend Fellowship.

The CEO contract, issued by the New York state, is not the first pay-for-success contract, but it is the first to be offered directly to individual qualified investors. In earlier deals, institutional investors like Goldman Sachs backed social impact bonds with their own capital. The New York state contract is the first test of private-investor interest in financing this new way to deliver preventive social services. With a minimum investment of $100,000 and a five-and-a-half-year lockup, the private investors committed an average of $300,000 each. The whole deal was brokered by an innovative nonprofit called Social Finance, which has helped bring the pay-for-success model from the United Kingdom to the United States. Other investors include the Utah philanthropist James Sorenson’s Sorenson Impact Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

Performance-based contracts are common in areas such as energy efficiency, in which predictable savings allow energy service companies to guarantee their results. But they’re new for social services, where conventional budgeting processes generally pay for services, not outcomes. To government bureaucrats, a reduced number of prison bed-days is at least as appealing as a lower electricity bill.

“Pay-for-success is a funding arrangement that allows governments to make risk-free investments in an effort to improve citizens’ lives,” says Leila Walsh, a spokeswoman for the Arnold Foundation. “It ensures that taxpayer dollars are allocated in the smartest, most efficient way.” She adds that any returns to her foundation will be reinvested to scale up the projects that prove to have impact.

For social service providers, social impact bonds represent a sea change not only in the amount but also in the kind of available capital. Payment in advance eliminates the challenge of meeting expenses while waiting for government reimbursement. Since investors are repaid based on outcomes, not inputs, unrestricted funding is not tied to specific program components and can be spent on what works best. With costs covered in full, providers can focus on services, not fundraising.

At CEO on a recent morning, dozens of men cluster around tall bistro tables with bright green chairs in the glass-enclosed reception area, waiting for their next work assignments. The agency runs its own social enterprise and contracts with city agencies and other companies to provide transitional employment that builds basic work skills and habits. Before the men go out to work, however, CEO helps them identify their own motivations in a one-week life-skills class. In two classrooms, life-skills sessions might be under way: one for younger participants ages 18 to 25, the other for older participants, some of whom have served sentences for more serious offenses, including murder and armed robbery.

In the first classroom, students are reading from an essay by basketball star Michael Jordan. “Everyone had a different agenda for me, but I had my own,” one young man reads. Heads nod around the room. One student says for jokes his mother wanted him to be a basketball player. He wants to start a clothing line.

“I just don’t want to go back to jail,” another says.In the other classroom, an instructor named Mary is leading about

20 men through a set of short, direct questions. “What is your goal when you leave this class?” Some of the responses, hesitant and mumbled, sound like lines the men may have heard from others: “To better myself.” “To take care of myself and my family.” “To be a positive member of my community.” Mary keeps pushing.

One man, wearing a collared shirt and glasses, lifts his head. “To get a job,” he answers. Bingo.

“Today is graduation day,” Mary says, as she distributes certificates and hugs. “Today marks something you started, and something you finished.”

The men will receive a badge, work boots, and their first assignment as official employees of CEO. Each employee is responsible for signing up for transitional job placements and can work at those sites for up to 75 days before moving into a permanent job placement. CEO seeks to place graduates in full-time jobs, ranging from the retail sector to food service to the construction trades. While challenges will remain, these are important steps on the ladder toward economic security and self-determination.

As with all philanthropy, measurement is crucial. And prison recidivism, which has been an easy and obvious target for the first social impact bonds in both the United Kingdom and the United States, offers relatively easy metrics. Reduced recidivism means dramatic savings in prison occupancy, victim assistance, and other social costs. Determining whether an individual is or isn’t in prison is binary, rather than the shades of gray that can color program results in other areas. The average number of days of incarceration per person is easily measured, as are the state’s financial savings.

CEO estimates that intensive job support for people coming out of incarceration saves $60,000 per individual per year. New York state, for example, was willing to pay about half of that, or $85 for each bed-day saved. High levels of incarceration, particularly of young black men, is an increasingly charged issue in local and national politics, but pay-for-success financing transforms it into a rational calculation. The New York state can repay the investors’ capital, with a modest premium, and still save millions of dollars in the long run. (It doesn’t hurt that the United States Department of Labor

Social impact bonds are attractive to

cash-strapped states becauselenders pay only when

results are proven and savings are realized.


And CEO is confident in keeping investors’ interest. “It’s not about share of wallet, it’s about share of mind-set,” says Jackie VanderBrug, the US Trust executive responsible for developing the firm’s sustainable investing strategy. “It’s going to be a very small percentage of their portfolio. But it’s going to be a big percentage of what they talk about around the Thanksgiving table with their grandkids.”

As investor interest grows, the pay-for-success model has the potential to scale up much more dramatically than either government spending or traditional charity. Already, more than $50 million in private capital in the United States has been mobilized through pay-for-success contracts targeting early childhood education in Utah and Chicago, as well as recidivism in Massachusetts and New York City, in addition to the New York state contract.

Since the first deal closed, New York has announced four finalists to its request for proposals for partners on additional pay-for-success initiatives in early childhood and child welfare, health care, and juvenile justice. CEO, Social Finance, and a California partner are pursuing an additional pay-for-success project in San Diego.

More broadly, if the New York state deal signals a wave of private investment in social impact bonds, it could usher in something like a new social contract, aligning private capital and the common good. In an earlier era, proven approaches, often developed by nonprofits, could be taken to scale by government agencies that would implement them more broadly. With public budgets under severe constraint, private funding needs to fill the gap. Once the savings are proven with private investment at risk, government can incorporate the solutions into normal budget processes.

“In the global financial crisis, taxpayer funds bailed out some large financial institutions,” says Tracy Palandjian, the chief executive of Social Finance. Social impact bonds flip that paradigm on its head. “Here, risks are privatized and gains are socialized. That’s a new model, one harnessing private capital to serve the public good.”

David Bank is editor and CEO of ImpactAlpha, a provider of news and data about investments that generate social, environmental, and financial returns. Jessica Pothering, a business and finance journalist, is a writer at ImpactAlpha.

will cover the repayment for service delivery taking place in the first two years, under a pilot program to test these kinds of financing arrangements.) And on top of those savings, New York will also benefit from the improved prospects of the target population and the community at large.

Investors will start to receive repayments if the project reduces the number of nights the clients in CEO’s target group spend back in prison by at least 36.8 bed-days per person, or 8 percent, compared with a similar group that does not receive CEO’s services. If performance exceeds those thresholds, investors can earn up to 12.5 percent after five and a half years. Once the minimum is met, investors get 100 percent of the state’s savings until their capital is repaid, then split additional savings 50-50 up to the cap. If reductions are even more dramatic, the state keeps the additional savings. Most observers expect returns in the mid-single digits.

The program must also show a 5 percent increase in employment—perhaps the key determinant in staying out of prison. In New York state, an estimated 44 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals on parole who are unemployed return to prison within two years. For those with part-time unemployment, it’s 29 percent, and for those with full-time employment, it’s 23 percent.

The contract is driving increased cooperation between the New York Department of Corrections and CEO. The data show that CEO is particularly effective with high-risk clients that it can reach as soon as possible after release. In the new program, the participant meets jointly with a parole officer and a CEO outreach worker in the very first weeks after release. That “match candidate” meeting is intended to convey that the candidate has been selected for a program specially tailored to his needs.

More broadly, the shared incentives mean state officials are eager to see the program work. CEO and state officials zip spreadsheets back and forth monthly, or even weekly, tracking enrollment rates to assess if the project is attracting the desired participation.

CEO is confident it can replicate the results from its earlier random-assignment evaluations. “There’s a risk we won’t, so we could suffer,” says Marta Nelson, who previously headed CEO’s New York City office. “If we don’t succeed, it’s going to be on the front page.”

The pay-for-success model has the potential

to scale up much more dramatically than

either government spending or traditional

charity.


Dele Olejede, Réjane Woodroffe

FACES:

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31ST ANNUAL AWARDS DINNER

Reed Hastings, Bill Bynum

WHO: Hundreds of friends of the Institute celebrated the Institute’s annual awards tradition. WHAT: The 31st Annual Awards

Dinner. WHERE: Guests enjoyed a reception and dinner at the historic Plaza Hotel in New York City. WHEN: November 13, 2014.

WHY: Netflix CEO and Henry Crown Fellow Reed Hastings and Roll Global co-owner Lynda Resnick were feted in an evening

that included an introduction of Resnick by comedian Stephen Colbert and a discussion by Hastings of net neutrality and

bringing “House of Cards” to the small screen.

Stephen Colbert

Mercedes T. Bass, Lynda Resnick, Arianna Huffington

Maryam Uwais, Andrei Tarnea, Lana Abu-Hijleh

Nasser Abdul Hadi

Madeleine Albright, Walter Isaacson, Anne Welsh McNulty

Nicole Avant, Ted Sarandos

89T H E A S P E N I D E A S U M M E R 2 0 1 5970.544.5800 510 East Hyman avEnuE, suitE 21, aspEn

Jeff Gordon ranchIf you have driven around Missouri Heights, you have surely noticed this extraordinary ranch as it seems to remain green even in dry years because of its significant water rights. The entire ranch encompasses 1,930 acres, 524 on the lower parcel and approximately 1,406 in the upper parcel. This working ranch has water rights from multiple ditches and springs as well as a 30% share of Consolidated Reservoir above the lower parcel. This is a ranch of many uses; raise horses and cattle, grow crops, hunt, endless recreational uses or even plan a development for the future. The views are dynamic. With no conservation easements currently in place on any part of the ranch, the sky is the limit - literally.

Offered for: $10,500,000

buck point ranchBuck Point Ranch is a 1,000+/- acre property located in one of the last pristine valleys in close proximity to Aspen. With senior water rights, sweeping, south-facing Elk Range views over irrigated meadows, a half-mile of West Coulter Creek, and adjacency to BLM lands, this property showcases western Colorado at its best. Surrounded by other large, legacy ranches, this unimproved property ranges in elevation from 7,200-8,500 feet, provides excellent hunting, and is unencumbered by a conservation easement, presenting a great land conservation opportunity with potentially lucrative tax credits for a landowner.


double c ranchDouble C Ranch is in a stunning setting on 35

acres. Five bedrooms and four and a half

baths with an open layout, a large living area

including dining, kitchen, living room with 35’

ceilings, a custom bar and large windows to view

the entire ranch. Access to miles of hiking and

riding trails, while only minutes to restaurants

and shopping. Extensive water rights for

irrigating pastures and growing hay. The property

includes a quarter mile of private river frontage

to the Roaring Fork River. It has a great indoor/

outdoor entertaining space with a vintage country

décor.

Offered for $5,495,000

cHris Flynn 970.618.5267

[email protected]

a. scOtt DaviDsOn 970.948.4800

[email protected]

tOny Dilucia 970.379.4275

[email protected]

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Brad Bachmann, Michelle Stern

FACES:

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ASPEN HOLIDAY PARTY

Leelee Harriman, Bill Harriman, Judy Lovins

WHO: The Society of Fellows is an intimate community of contributors to the Institute. WHAT: The annual Aspen Holiday Party

gives friends of the Institute an opportunity to celebrate the season and the year’s accomplishments. WHERE: The Doerr-

Hosier Center in its full holiday regalia. WHEN: December 29, 2014. WHY: A live band provided entertainment for the evening,

which included a conversation with Mike and Jackie Bezos about the work of the Bezos Family Foundation.

Mercedes T. Bass,

Alan Fletcher,

Ann Hudson

Judith Steinberg, Peter Rispoli, Maxwell Rispoli

Jeff Bezos

Elliot Gerson, Mike Bezos

Jay and Linda Sandrich


MAUREENSTAPLETONmaureenstapleton.net 970.948.9331 cell [email protected]

1. 60 acres, 11,000 sq ft home, amazing views, privacy $17.8M

2. Walk to Aspen Core, 2,800 sq ft on a 3,000 sq ft lot $3.3M

3. 14 new townhomes on Aspen Mtn. $8.5M to $16.2M Delivery Fall 2017

4. In the woods privacy, ski-in/ski-out, elevator, views, perfect $8.25M

5. Red Mtn. location with Independence to Mt. Sopris views, privacy $8.9M

6. Modern family home, sprawling lawn, river, views, fun $4.2M

7. Smokin’ hot deal, West Aspen location, expansion possibilities $2.1M

8. The best ski-in/ski-out on Cascade, sun, views, A/C, great floor plan $8.5M

Owning Real Estate in Aspen/Snowmass …always a great IDEA

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TISCH AWARDS

Laurie M. Tisch

FACES:

WHO: Legendary civil rights leader and US Representative John Lewis received the 2015 Preston Robert Tisch Award for Civic

Leadership. WHAT: NPR’s Michel Martin led an inspiring conversation with Lewis before a dinner for special guests. WHEN:

December 8, 2014. WHERE: Florence Gould Hall at the French Institute Alliance in New York City. WHY: The annual Tisch

Award was created in 2009 by Bob Tisch’s children to honor their father’s legacy of public service and philanthropy.

Tracey Kemble, Michel Martin, Charles Sheffield

Roy Bostock, John Lewis

Emily Tisch Sussman

Darren Walker

Roy and Merilee Bostock


The esTaTe aT 275 sunnysidea True Compound

The Estate at 275 Sunnyside is a true compound consisting of a 6 bedroom 11,210

square foot main house, a 2 bedroom 1,040 square foot guest house, and a 1,930

square foot barn all on over 15 flat, usable, fenced and gated acres with ponds and live

water. At only 10 minutes to the Hotel Jerome, there is simply nothing else like it on

the market. This property has it all with signature southern views, acreage, water rights,

proximity to town and enough space for even the largest of extended families.

Price available upon request.

aspen associates realty group510 east hyman avenue, suite 21

aspen 970.544.5800

Jonathan Feinberg 970.379.3405 [email protected]

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Jim Crown, Bob Hurst

Alma Gildenhorn, Marty Sherwin, Michael Eisner

Patr

ice G

ilbert

SPRING RECEPTIONFACES:

WHO: Institute Trustees and special guests gathered in Washington, DC. WHAT: The event concluded the 2015 Society of

Fellows Day in Washington, where attendees learned about new Institute happenings, including the Endangered American

Dream initiative. The reception celebrated the official launch of the Latinos and Society Program. WHEN: April 9, 2015. WHERE:

The Finnish Embassy, a Scandinavian-designed oasis in the nation’s capital. WHY: The reception offered new and longtime

members of the Institute a chance to catch up and enjoy each other’s company.

Laysha Ward, Viviane Warren

Carol Adelman, Bonnie McCloskey, Diane Morris

Larry Thomas, Atti Worku, Paul Dimoh, Jerry Augustin

Elliot Gerson, Norma Saafir

Nathalie Reyes, Luis Echarte

Walter Isaacson, Ambassador Ritva Koukku-Ronde,Bob Steel


Education has the power to expand opportunities and transform lives

waltonfamilyfoundation.org I twitter.com/waltonfamilyfdn I facebook.com/waltonfamilyfoundation

The Walton Family Foundation is working to improve K-12 outcomes for all students, especially those of limited means, by ensuring access to high-quality educational choices

that prepare them for a lifetime of opportunity.



Peter Hirshberg, James Waldron,

KC Waldron

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FACES:

WHO: The next generation of leaders from across industries were led in a weekend of conversation by Socrates moderators

Eric Liu, director of the Aspen Program on Citizenship and American Identity; Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of the

New America Foundation; and Peter Orszag, vice chairman of global banking for Citigroup. WHAT: The 2015 Socrates Winter

Seminars. WHEN: February 13–16, 2015. WHERE: Roundtable conversations took place on the Aspen Meadows campus, and for

a bit of diversion, participants skied up and down the slopes of Aspen. WHY: The Socrates Program provides a forum for young

emerging leaders to convene and explore contemporary issues through expert-moderated dialogue. Participants were also

invited to ski, practice yoga, and make new connections.

2015 WINTER SOCRATES PROGRAM

Eric Liu

Timothy Kim

Nayyera Haq

Peter Orszag

Charlotte HIll, Victoria Gullo, Kim Smolik

Oscar Bedolla


legacy noun | leg·a·cy | \'le-g e-sē\

2: Something transmitted from an ancestor

BUTTERMILK WEST ESTATE T WENT Y ONE M ILL ION NINE HUNDRED THOUSAND

If you are prepared to leave a lasting Legacy…

estate noun | es-tate | \ i-'stāt\ 4a : the degree, quality, nature, and extent of one’s interest in land or other property

and want to enjoy your own Rocky Mountain Estate…

CALL ME FOR A PRIVATE SHOWING

SearchHomesInAspen.com

Doug Leibinger 970.379.9045

[email protected]

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INTERNATIONAL PARTNERS

BILL CLINTON SPEAKS AT A MÉXICO SUMMIT ON YOUTH AND PRODUCTIVITYIn February, the Aspen Institute México, the Inter-American

Development Bank, and the Laureate International Universities

convened a solution-focused gathering on how technical

and vocational education can help create a more productive

workforce in México. More than 400 leaders in politics,

business, arts, and civil society, as well as local university

students, attended the first Laureate Summit on Youth and

Productivity at the Universidad del Valle de México Campus

Coyoacan, in México City. The summit was also streamed

online to thousands of viewers. Former US President Bill

Clinton, along with other distinguished guests, participated

in the session focused on improving the workforce with

new models of higher education, effective public policies,

and employer practices. This year’s gathering came at a

critical time as México’s Congress has passed 11 structural

reforms over the past two years in order to improve global

competitiveness.

Ildelfonso Guajardo, minister of economy, and Emilio

Chuayfett, minister of education, addressed the audience and

spoke of the relevance of entrepreneurship in both national

education and economic development. “Innovation is the new

GLOBAL REACH

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frontier,” said Guajardo. “The challenge for new generations is

how to give value to global chains.” The minister of education

reaffirmed the government’s commitment to diminishing the

gap in access to higher education. The closing dialogue brought

together Clinton; Luis Moreno, president of the Inter-American

Development Bank; Douglas Becker, president of Laureate

Education Inc.; and Juan Ramón de la Fuente, president of

Aspen Institute México. They proposed that inclusion and

improving technical education would positively impact the labor

market in México. President Clinton advised, “Think about what

you want México to look like in ten years and work toward that.”

ANANTA ASPEN CENTRE WELCOMES NEW CHAIRMAN AND DISCUSSES OBAMA’S INDIA VISIT Thoppil Ninan Ninan, chairman of Business Standard, is the new

chairman of the Ananta Aspen Centre. Ninan succeeds Gautam

Thapar, founder and chairman of the Avantha Group who

decided to step down as the centre’s chief after a stellar five-year

term. In an illustrious career spanning a quarter-century in the

media, Ninan has been at the helm of several news organizations.

He was the editor of Business Standard (also its publisher from

1996), Economic Times, and Business World, bringing about

radical change and achieving rapid growth in all of them during

his stewardship. He was also executive editor at India Today in the

BILL CLINTON ADDRESSES ASPEN INSTITUTE MÉXICO’S YOUTH AND PRODUCTIVITY SUMMIT: “THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT MÉXICO TO LOOK

LIKE IN TEN YEARS AND WORK TOWARD THAT.”

Juan Ramón de la Fuente (far left) and Bill Clinton in México



1980s and a television commentator

on economic and business issues.

Ninan has been president of the

Editors Guild of India and a committee

chairman at the Confederation of

Indian Industry. He is a board member

of the World Editors Forum and a the

recipient of many awards, including

the B.D. Goenka Award for Excellence

in Journalism.

And on January 9, the Ananta Aspen Centre in New Delhi

organized a public program on President Obama’s second

visit to India. On the following day, the Aspen Strategy Group

held its 20th US-India Strategic Dialogue, bringing to India a

delegation that included former Ambassadors to India Robert

Blackwill, Timothy Roemer, and Frank Wisner. The group also

met with Rich Verma, a longtime member of the dialogue who

now serves as ambassador to India.

Delegations from both countries agreed to create a

working group focused on cybersecurity that will offer

recommendations on how India and the United States might

cooperate more closely. Indian and American thought leaders

emphasized that President Obama’s decision to accept Prime

Minister Modi’s invitation for India’s Republic Day presented a

great opportunity to strengthen the relationship. “The sky is the

limit in the bilateral relationship,” they agreed.

ASPEN FRANCE CONNECTING EUROPE AND AFRICAAspen France organized the 11th Aspen Europe–Africa

convening on December 3–4, 2014, titled “New Connections,

New Partnerships” at Allen & Overy in Paris. The summit

focused on how the relationship between Europe and Africa

today is being transformed by technological innovations.

European and African participants took part in the forum,

sponsored by French President Francois Hollande. The

event provided an opportunity for more than 180 European

and African leaders to exchange views on the key theme

of technological innovation. Among the participants were

Alassane Ouattara, president of the Republic of Ivory Coast;

Laurent Fabius, minister of foreign affairs and international

development; Cristina Duarte, minister of finance of Cape

Verde; Jean-Michel Blanquer, CEO of ESSEC; Axelle Lemaire,

secretary of state for digital; and Olara Otunnu, president of

LBL Foundation for Children and an Aspen Institute Trustee.

A CONVERSATION ON SPAINIn February, Aspen España held the seminar “A Conversation

on Spain: The Current State and the Future of Education,”

bringing together 50 national leaders on education—teachers,

regulators, sociologists, and social innovators—to engage in

a dialogue on the current state and challenges in education

in Spain today and the much-needed change in education

paradigm. Spanish teacher César Bona provided the keynote

speech “Challenges of a Teacher.” César is the first Spaniard to

be nominated for the Global Teacher Prize, and in the words

of Jane Goodall, “He is opening new horizons for children,

creating future leaders, and empowering them to take actions

that are changing them to change societies.”

The seminar, organized in collaboration with Fundación

Telefonica and Ashoka Spain, is part of the Aspen

Transformations of Spain Program, launched in 2013. The goal

of this program is to provide a forum for Spanish leaders from

different fields to reflect and debate over issues of economic,

political, and social importance and to help create new

initiatives through these networks.

ASPEN ROMANIA LEADERSHIP AWARDS AND GALA DINNER 2014The fourth Aspen Romania Gala took place in December

2014. This annual gathering of the extended Aspen

Romania community honors the 8th class of the Young

Ninan

Wisner and Ajit Doval

Adrian Gheorghe, a 2014 Aspen Romania Fellow

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Leaders Program for its accomplishments in attempting

to produce a significant impact on societies across

Central and Eastern Europe. The Romanian minister of

health and representatives of other state and private

institutions commended Aspen Romania’s work. The

event acknowledged the social contribution, sacrifice,

and generosity of veterans and officers in the Romanian

army as well as others in public service. The 2014 awards

were given to Pierre Moscovici, European commissioner

for economic and financial affairs, taxation, and customs

(the Values-Based Leadership Award); Paula Todoran,

long-distance runner (the Sports and Society Leadership

Award); Sergeant Major Florinel Enache (the Service with

Dignity Leadership Award); Rada Mihalcea, associate

professor, University of Michigan (the Innovation and

Technology Leadership Award); Sibiu International

Theatre Festival (the Contribution to Romanian Cultural

Patrimony Leadership Award); and the Romanian

Intelligence Service (the Aspen 2014 Special Award for

Public Service).

Many of the Young Leaders Program Fellows created

projects to address needs in vulnerable communities and

in critical areas of social development. In recognition of

their venture and vision, Aspen Romania introduced a

grant to be given each year to a special project. This year,

the Aspen Social Action Prize was offered to MagiCamp—a

two-week summer camp for children undergoing cancer

treatment.

ASPEN PRAGUE CELEBRATES CREATIVE PLACE-MAKINGIn November 2014—and in cooperation with Pilsen,

the European Capital of Culture 2015—Aspen Prague

organized OPEN UP!, a two-day festival promoting the

idea of creative place-making. The event, launched with

a public conference and followed by a cultural evening of

expert sessions, brought together creative place-making

pioneers. Guests—including Ann Markusen of the Arts

Economy Institute, Daniel Latorre of the Project for Public

Spaces, Andy Robinson of Futurecity in Cambridge, and

Igor Marko of Marko and Placemakers in London—shared

their views and experiences shaping urban areas around

arts and culture.

Aspen Prague also presented outcomes of the

yearly project on community financing in Central Europe

“Crowdfunding Visegrad.” As part of the project, a manual

and a study describing the use, legal environment, and

challenges of crowdfunding was published.

ASPEN GERMANY’S SOUTHEAST EUROPE FOREIGN MINISTERS’ CONFERENCEThe Aspen Institute Germany in cooperation with the

German Federal Foreign Office and the British Embassy

in Berlin held its sixth Southeast Europe Foreign

Ministers’ conference in November, under the patronage

of Federal Foreign Minister Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier

and Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond. The foreign

ministers assembled their colleagues from Albania,

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia,

Montenegro, and Serbia, as well as the deputy assistant

secretary for European and Eurasian affairs from the

US State Department. The opening panel discussion

among business representatives from Germany and the

United Kingdom stressed that regional cooperation and

infrastructure enhancement were vital for investments

for economic development in the Western Balkans. The

countries of the region would have to increasingly assume

responsibility for such reforms.

Additionally, Steinmeier and Hammond launched

a joint German-British initiative to revitalize the reform

process in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is supposed to

lead the country back on track toward European Union

accession. The initiative was wholeheartedly welcomed

and supported both at the conference and also by the

Western Balkans, the European Union, and the United

States. The following panel discussion focused on the

topic of EU integration and how to sustain progress and

reform in this field. All of the participants agreed that the

Western Balkans were part of Europe and that the EU

membership perspective for the countries of the region

had to be maintained. However, the conditionality of the

accession negotiations would have to be upheld as well.

At the same time, active support by the European Union

and its member states for reform efforts in the region

would be necessary.

Aspen Prague hosts a two-day festival, OPEN UP!, to celebrate creative place-making and unique public spaces.

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ASPEN INSTITUTE ESPAÑA

Madrid, Spain

[email protected]

aspeninstitute.es

INSTITUT ASPEN FRANCE

Paris, France

[email protected]

aspenfrance.org

ASPEN INSTITUTE GERMANY

Berlin, Germany

[email protected]

aspeninstitute.de

ANANTA ASPEN CENTRE

New Delhi, India

[email protected]

anantacentre.in

ASPEN INSTITUTE ITALIA

Milan and Rome, Italy

[email protected]

aspeninstitute.it

THE ASPEN INSTITUTE JAPAN

Tokyo, Japan

aspeninstitute.jp

ASPEN INSTITUTE MÉXICO

México City and Cancún, México

[email protected]

aspeninstitutemexico.org

ASPEN INSTITUTE PRAGUE

Prague, Czech Republic

[email protected]

aspeninstitute.cz

INSTITUTUL ASPEN ROMÂNIA

Bucharest, Romania

[email protected]

aspeninstitute.ro

CONTACT OUR INTERNATIONAL

PARTNERS

Floral Arts for Weddings, Events & Everyday

300 Puppy Smith St. ~ Aspen, CO970.920.6838 ~ www.sashae.com

Sashae_AspenIdea_sum14.indd 1 4/27/14 7:28 PM

JOHN SARPA 970.379.2595 [email protected]

John Sarpa – my close connection with the Aspen Institute began 25 years ago when I co-chaired a group of dedicated leaders of various nonprofit organizations to successfully rezone the Aspen Meadows. That was a key step for the Institute in securing its long term presence in Aspen.

Since then I have been involved with millions of dollars of Aspen real estate developments and home purchases. Please let me help you make your real estate investment in the mountains so that you too may experience the mind, body and spiritual joys so unique to Aspen.


FACTS/PROGRAMS

Institute seminars offer time for reflection and conversation in a bucolic setting.

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.

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.

aspeninstitute.org/aspenseminar

JUNE 6–12, 2015 | ASPEN, COLORADO

AUGUST 15–21, 2015 | ASPEN, COLORADO

SEPTEMBER 12–18, 2015 | ASPEN, COLORADO

OCTOBER 10–16, 2015 | WYE RIVER, MARYLAND

LEADERSHIP AND CHARACTERLeadership 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.org/characterseminar

NATURE, SOCIETY, AND SUSTAINABILITYNature, 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

AUGUST 19-23, 2015 | COLORADO ROCKIES

ASPEN LIFE REIMAGINED SEMINAR The Aspen Life Reimagined Seminar helps professionals of all ages navigate transitions and discover what’s next in work and life, refining their sense of purpose, and honing the skills of self-leadership to make the best use of their time, talent, and treasure. This seminar is in partnership with AARP’s Life Reimagined Institute. aspeninstitute.org/lifereimagined

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

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IN THE NEW WEST, THE GOOD GUYS WEAR THE MASKS.

Meet pioneering fetal

surgeon Dr. Timothy

Crombleholme, director

of the Colorado Institute

for Maternal and Fetal

Health on the Anschutz

Medical Campus. Every

day he and his team dare

to imagine extradinary

innovations that will

change the future of life

forever. Here, we’re not

afraid of what’s beyond

the horizon.

TheFrontierOfWhatsNext.com

EXPLORE WITH US.

AspenIdea-FullPage_2015.indd 1 4/17/15 10:22 AMresizing template.indd 1 4/22/15 11:58 AM


FACTS/PROGRAMS

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT THE INDIVIDUAL PROGRAMS LISTED ABOVE.

ASPEN ROMANIA LEADERSHIP SEMINARIn 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

JUSTICE & SOCIETY SEMINAR

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. aspeninstitute.org/jss

Moderators: Dr. Sanford Levinson, professor of law and government at The University of Texas and visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School, and Hon. Deanel Reece Tacha, dean and professor at Pepperdine University School of Law and former chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

JULY 6–12, 2015 | ASPEN, COLORADO

Participation is by invitation only.

WYE ACADEMIC PROGRAMSIn 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: Citizenship in the American and Global Polity

JUNE 7–11, 2015 | WYE RIVER, MARYLAND

Wye Faculty Seminar: Citizenship in the American and Global Polity

JULY 18–24, 2015 | WYE RIVER, MARYLAND

CUSTOM SEMINARSCustom 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

Dan

Bayer


Spacious, Light-filled Core Townhome• 3 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 2,586 sq ft• Vaulted ceilings, 2 south facing balconies• Spacious master suite, with double walk-in

closets, encompasses the entire second level• Spectacular views of Aspen Mountain, Red

Mountain and Smuggler• End townhome located on a peaceful

cul-de-sac• Completely renovated in 2015 using a fresh

pallet of mountain chic, organic textures of stone and wood, mixed with the finest end finishes

$5,995,000

AspenSnowmassSIR.com www.Aspen4Sale.com

PAT MARQUIS 970.925.4200 [email protected] Real Estate SpecialistMaster Certified Negotiation Expert Certified International Property Specialist

You can have Aspen… just the way you like it!

Starwood’s Garden of Eden• 4 bedrooms, 4.5 baths, 6,350 sq ft, 3.83 acres• Starwood’s best views from Aspen

Highlands to Mt. Sopris• Cascading waterfall, custom rock hot

tub, “blue grotto” indoor pool• Formal dining room, study/library,

entertainment area and artist’s studio/mother-in-law cottage

• Three-car garage and 3-car carport• Starwood offers 960 acres including

Nordic and equestrian trails, tennis courts and a guarded entry

$4,750,000

PatMarquis ASPEN IDEA Summer 15.indd 1 4/27/15 11:15 AM


FACTS/PROGRAMS

LEADERSHIP

THE ASPEN GLOBAL LEADERSHIP NETWORKEach 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 2,000 Fellows in 49 countries.

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 13 DIFFERENT FELLOWSHIPS.

THE HENRY CROWN FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMThe flagship leadership programaspeninstitute.org/crown

THE AFRICA LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE (ALI)/EAST AFRICATanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenyaaspeninstitute.org/ali

THE AFRICA LEADERSHIP

INITIATIVE (ALI)/WEST AFRICA

Ghana and Nigeriaaspeninstitute.org/ali

THE AFRICA LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE (ALI)/SOUTH AFRICA aspeninstitute.org/ali

THE ASPEN INSTITUTE-RODELFELLOWSHIPS IN PUBLIC LEADERSHIPElected leaders in US governmentaspeninstitute.org/rodel

THE CATTO FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMEnergy and environment leaders aspeninstitute.org/catto

THE CENTRAL AMERICA LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE (CALI)Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica,Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvadoraspeninstitute.org/cali

THE CHINA FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/china

THE INDIA LEADERSHIP INITIATIVE (ILI)aspeninstitute.org/ili

THE LIBERTY FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMSouth Carolinaaspeninstitute.org/liberty

THE MIDDLE EAST LEADERSHIPINITIATIVE (MELI)aspeninstitute.org/meli

PAHARA-ASPEN EDUCATION FELLOWSHIP Entrepreneurial leaders for public education pahara.org

THE ASPEN INSTITUTE HEALTH INNOVATORS FELLOWSHIPUS health care innovatorsaspeninstitute.org/hif

CENTER FOR URBAN INNOVATIONThe 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/ center-urban-innovation

Africa Leadership Initiative Fellow and 2014 John P. McNulty Prize–winner Réjane Woodroffe, founder of the Bulungula Incubator, provides world-class preschool, health care, and other vital needs.

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tari

es


At Mayo Clinic we constantly strive to set the standard for quality care for the

benefit of every patient. We pursue medical advancements and develop new

procedures so that each patient gets exactly the care they need. And we freely

share our knowledge for the benefit of everyone.

Visit us in the Murdock Lounge at the Doerr-Hosier Center.

Advancing Science. Sharing Knowledge.

+ =



FACTS/PROGRAMS

Socrates Summer Seminar 2014

Lasting ImpressionsDesigner Day, Evening, and

Casual Separates Made for Travel675 East Cooper Avenue · Aspen · 970.429.8454

New York, Vail, Chevy Chase, MD, Atlanta, Palm Desert,

San Francisco, Seattle, Nantucket, Birmingham, MI, Cleveland, Easton & Chestertown, MD

www.ninamclemore.com

SOCRATESPROGRAMT

HE

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

SUMMER SEMINARS

JULY 10–13, 2015THE FUTURE OF WORK & SKILLS IN THE DIGITAL AGEModerator: John Irons

RACE AND CULTURAL IDENTITYModerators: Lani Guinier and Susan P. Sturm

THE FUTURE OF PRIVACY AND TRANSPARENCY: SURVEILLANCE IN THE DIGITAL AGEModerator: Jeffrey Rosen

HOW TECHNOLOGY IS AFFECTING OUR LIVES, THE WAY WE DO BUSINESS, AND ITS POTENTIAL TO AFFECT SOCIAL CHANGEModerator: Sonal Shah

U.S. POLICY AND ISIS: COPING WITH JIHAD 2.0Moderator: James Traub

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For over 60 years, the Aspen Institute has convened the world’s leaders to pause and reflect on the critical issues of our time.

At the third annual Aspen Action Forum, we invite these leaders to do more than just reflect. We encourage them to move “from thought to action”.

Track the progress past participants are making with Action Pledges.Watch our series of short video updates to learn about how they’removing the needle on changes in their communities.

Visit www.AspenActionForum.org.

MAJOR FUNDING PROVIDED BYTHE RESNICK FAMILY FOUNDATION

ADDITIONAL SPONSORSHIP PROVIDED BYDavid M. Rubenstein

AccentureThe Skoll Foundation

Care.com and WomenUpMichael Klein and Joany FabrySabrina and Antonio GraciasThe John P. and Anne Welsh McNulty Foundation Margot and Tom PritzkerGillian and Robert Steel

July 28 – 31, 2015 • Aspen, Colorado

SENATE SOCRATES

OCTOBER 16–18, 2015PHILADELPHIA, PA

INTERNATIONAL SEMINARS

OCTOBER 22–24, 2015SINTRA, PORTUGAL

NOVEMBER 5–7, 2015MEXICO

Teen Socrates


FACTS/PROGRAMS

SOF SUMMER OPENING RECEPTION June 23 | The Doerr-Hosier Center | Aspen

SOF VANGUARD CHAPTER SUMMER RECEPTION July 15 | Private Home | Aspen

SOF FORUM: CULTURAL DIPLOMACY: WHY ART MATTERS July 17 | The Doerr-Hosier Center | Aspen

SOF SYMPOSIUM: ISIS August 9–12 | Koch Building | Aspen

SOF SUMMER CLOSING RECEPTION August 13 | Doerr-Hosier Center | Aspen

SOF VANGUARD RECEPTION September 2015 | San Francisco

SOF DISCUSSION RECEPTION FEATURING GILLIAN TETT October 26 | San Francisco

*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 [email protected]

PC

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S

JOIN THE SOCIETY OF FELLOWS


PUBLIC

ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVALThis 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.

aspenideas.org

WASHINGTON IDEAS FORUMPresented in partnership with

The Atlantic and the Newseum,

this Washington, DC–based event

features leading figures in public

policy discussing the most important

issues of the day.

NEW YORK IDEASThe Institute and The Atlantic host an

annual event featuring cutting-edge

innovators in discussion on the state

of the global business landscape.

ASPEN WORDSThroughout 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 SECURITY FORUMOn the Institute’s campus in Aspen,

the Aspen Security Forum convenes

leaders in government, industry,

media, think tanks, and academia to

explore key homeland security and

counter terrorism issues.

aspensecurityforum.org

THE ASPEN CHALLENGEWith the Bezos Family Foundation,

the Aspen Challenge provides a

platform, inspiration, and tools for

young people to design solutions

to some of the most critical and

complicated problems our

society faces.

theaspenchallenge.org

THE ASPEN INSTITUTE ARTS PROGRAMThe 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.


ONGOING PROGRAMS IN NEW YORKThe Institute hosts a variety of pro-

grams 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 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.

aspeninstitute.org/aspenevents

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.

aspeninstitute.org/events

Public conferences and events provide a commons for people to share ideas.

“House of Cards” show-runner Beau Willimon

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FACTS/PROGRAMS

ASCEND, THE FAMILY ECONOMIC SECURITY PROGRAMascend.aspeninstitute.org

ASPEN FORUM FOR COMMUNITY SOLUTIONS aspeninstitute.org/solutions

ASPEN GLOBAL HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT aspeninstitute.org/ghd

ASPEN INSTITUTE FRANKLIN PROJECT aspeninstitute.org/franklin-project

ASPEN INSTITUTE LATINOS AND SOCIETY PROGRAMaspeninstitute.org/policy-work/

latinos-society

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

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

CENTER FOR NATIVE AMERICAN YOUTHcnay.org

CITIZENSHIP AND AMERICAN IDENTITY PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/citizenship

COLLEGE EXCELLENCE PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/college-excellence

COMMUNICATIONS AND SOCIETY PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/c&s

COMMUNITY STRATEGIES GROUP aspeninstitute.org/csg

CONGRESSIONAL PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/congressional

ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITIES PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/eop

EDUCATION AND SOCIETY PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/education

ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/ee

GLOBAL ALLIANCES PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/gap

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

HOMELAND SECURITY PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/security

INITIATIVE ON FINANCIAL SECURITY aspeninstitute.org/ifs

JUSTICE AND SOCIETY PROGRAM aspeninstitute.org/justice

MIDDLE EAST PROGRAMS aspeninstitute.org/mideast

PROGRAM ON PHILANTHROPY AND SOCIAL INNOVATION aspeninstitute.org/psi

PROGRAM ON THE WORLD ECONOMY aspeninstitute.org/pwe

ROUNDTABLE ON COMMUNITY CHANGE aspeninstitute.org/rcc

SPORTS AND SOCIETY sportsandsociety.org

US Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker at the Institute

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115970.544.5800 510 East Hyman avEnuE, suitE 21, aspEn

Amen WArdy’s mAsterpiece

Amen Wardy, the creative genius behind

Amen Wardy Home, has been instrumental

in creating an entirely new perspective

in home design and entertaining since

1954. Exclusively located in Woody

Creek, just outside of Aspen, this 15-acre

property and 7,300 square foot home

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Price upon request

red mountAin modern

Mountain meets modern in this new Red Mountain residence with serendipitous results. State of the art design and attention grabbing details create a home with all the elements that one would expect from this special home. Expansive views from Aspen Mountain to Mt. Sopris and a sunny southern exposure gives this home a distinct sense of place. The home includes 6 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms and 2 powder rooms. There is a gourmet chefs kitchen, huge family/game room with bar and wine cellar, a gym and a sound proof media room. All of this is easily accessed via generous stairways and a glass elevator.


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FACTS/PROGRAMS

Born from the myriad policy programs at the Aspen Institute, the Policy Leadership Programs

seek to empower exceptional individuals to lead with innovation in their chosen fields. These

individuals then become more effective change agents who can influence the institutions and

fields in which they work (or lead) to create better outcomes for society.

POLICY PROGRAMFELLOWSHIPS

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.

aspeninstitute.org/newvoices

THE ASCEND FELLOWSHIP

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

FIRST MOVERS FELLOWSHIP

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

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

SERIOUS MEETINGS THE NATURAL WAYWith 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.

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Elegant - Timeless - ContemporaryViews of Aspen Mountain, Tiehack, Hunter Creek. Custom fi nishes include palladium-leafed cabinetry, use of semiprecious stone, luxe Italian furnishings, rich textures and Minnotti Cucina kitchen. The result is singular, exemplary. Enjoy the peaceful locale at the base of Tiehack ski area, amongst the rolling green fairways of the world famous Maroon Creek Club. Walk to the school campus or the Aspen Recreation Center. Includes six bedrooms, luxe decor, Indoor/ Outdoor living and 10,241 square feet.$13,950,000. Priced to sell.

For details see susanplummeraspen.com.

Susan Plummer970.948.6786

[email protected]

Follow me: @SusanPlummerAspen



FACTS/PROGRAMS

“ALL KNOWLEDGE STARTS WITH A CONVERSATION”Trustee Jim Rogers and Mary Anne Rogers pledged $1

million to establish the James E. Rogers Energy Fellow

position as part of the Institute’s Energy and Environment

Program. The gift also continues their support of the

Business and Society Program, in particular its efforts to

change the narrative in business and in classrooms about the

corporation’s purpose. Working with the executive director

and program staff, the James E. Rogers Energy Fellow will

serve as the lead position for research, development, and

delivery of the Energy and Environment Program’s major

annual forums. Rogers says that, at the Institute, “I observed

many conversations that led to important, nuanced insights

molding the opinions of the participants, many of whom

then worked to shape US policy. It is in these forums where

the Aspen Institute’s belief that all knowledge starts with a

conversation comes true.”

ILLUMINATING THE INSTITUTETrustee Laurie M. Tisch and

The Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund pledged $1 million to establish

the Laurie M. Tisch Endowed

Scholarship Fund to support an array

of programs across the Institute,

including Project Play; Aspen Across

America; the Health, Medicine, and

Society Program; and the Franklin

Project. The Illumination Fund also

continued its generous support

of the “Aspen Leadership Series:

Conversations with Great Leaders in

Memory of Preston Robert Tisch,”

the Institute’s signature New York

City speaker series.

OUR SUPPORTERS

Jim and Mary Anne Rogers

Laurie M. Tisch

Patr

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LET’S USE THE POWER OF IDEAS TO CHANGE THE GAME.A new type of fl oodlit pitch is having a positive impact on the people of a Brazilianfavela. How it’s powered could help generate renewable energy elsewhere. Laurence Kemball-Cook, a winner of Shell’s LiveWIRE scheme, developed technology that creates power from a combination of kinetic energy from the players’ footsteps and solar power. We believe today’s ingenuity could answer tomorrow’s energy challenges. Learn more at www.youtube.com/shellletsgo

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FACTS/PROGRAMS

NEW YORK SOCIETY—OF FELLOWSWith generous underwriting support from Society of Fellows members Merilee Bostock and Roy Bostock, and Ilona Nemeth and Alan Quasha, the Institute has launched a new series of Society of Fellows (SOF) discussion receptions in New York

City. Hosted in the private homes of SOF members and other Institute friends, these small gatherings will feature moderated

panels and speakers discussing a variety of topics, including issues of particular interest to a New York audience.

The Ricardo Salinas Foundation has pledged $1.5 million to provide core funding for

the Institute’s Latinos and Society Program and also to establish the Ricardo Salinas

Foundation Scholarship Fund, which will help increase the number of Latinos and Latin

Americans able to attend the Institute’s public events, policy roundtables, leadership

seminars, and other convenings. Ricardo Salinas joined

the Board of Trustees in 2014 and was recognized for his

exceptional gift during a special reception introducing the

Latinos and Society Program to trustees and other close

Institute friends held at the Finnish Embassy in Washington.

And there’s more: Society of Fellows member Woody Hunt and the Hunt Family Foundation pledged a $600,000

challenge grant to the Latinos and Society Program in order

to inspire other donors to support the program’s Annual

Policy Summit and its Awareness and Education Tours, which

will take policymakers, members of the media, and others to

visit some of the communities along America’s borders.

LEAVING A LEGACY

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Ilona Nemeth and Alan Quasha

Woody and Gayle HuntRicardo Salinas

Roy and Merilee Bostock

LATINO VOICES AT ASPEN

The Institute continues to work closely with longtime

supporters who are interested in making a planned gift

to help secure the future of the Institute. Donors who

confirm their plans to make a bequest become members

of the Institute’s Heritage Society. In the past six months,

the Institute has received such confirmations from

Trustee William A. Nitze and Ann Nitze, and Society of

Fellows members Joan Lebach and Curt Strand.

A GOOD LIFE DESERVES A LASTING LEGACY.

WHAT WILL YOURS BE?

Charitable giving is one very important way to make a difference, and by supporting the Aspen Institute you can help extend your impact on our programs for generations to come.

Please Join Us August 5th for a special Heritage Society

Luncheon at Plato’s Restaurant on Aspen Meadows.

Please contact Kristin Robinson,

Vice President of Development, at [email protected] or

(202) 736-3852 for information on options for your family and the benefits of membership in The Heritage Society.

aspeninstitute.giftplans.org

LEGACY

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DANCE FOR KIDS!DANCEBRAZIL

July 8 | 4:00pmGenerously underwritten by Les Dames d’Aspen

DANCEBRAZILJuly 8 | 8:00pm

Generously underwritten by Les Dames d’Aspen

ASPEN SANTA FE BALLETJuly 18 & 28 | 8:00pm

Generously underwritten by Carolyn Powers

JUAN SIDDI FLAMENCO SANTA FEJuly 23 | 8:00pm

Generously underwritten by Les Dames d’Aspen

DANCE FOR KIDS!ZAP - LES BALLETS JAZZ DE MONTRÉAL

August 8 | 4:00pmGenerously underwritten by Melinda and Norman Payson

LES BALLETS JAZZ DE MONTRÉALAugust 7 & 8 | 8:00pm

Generously underwritten by Melinda and Norman Payson

ASPEN SANTA FE BALLETAugust 22 | 8:00pm

Generously underwritten by Carolyn Powers

ASPE

N SA

NTA F

E BAL

LET

PR

ES

EN

TS 2015 SUMMER SEASONSEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR

Tickets and information: www.aspensantafeballet.comOFFICIAL HEALTH CLUB AND SPA

OF ASPEN SANTA FE BALLETLes Dames d’Aspen, Ltd.

MFFMorgridge Family Foundation

OFFICIAL SPONSORS FOUNDATION SPONSORS PREFERRED HOTEL SPONSORGOVERNMENT SPONSORS MEDIA SPONSORS

SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR

PHOTO: GREGORY BATARDON


FACTS/PROGRAMS

Thank you to our partners for helping us reimagine youth sports in America.

THE NATION’S PREMIER GATHERING OF LEADERS AT THE INTERSECTION OF

SPORTS, HEALTH, AND YOUTH

Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy, U.S. Surgeon General Indi Cowie, Professional Soccer Freestyler

Anthony Robles, Hall of Fame wrestlerAnthony Robles, Hall of Fame wrestler


Gary Bettman, National Hockey League Dr. Edwin Moses, Laureus USA and Olympic Legend

Allyson Felix, Olympian, and Mo’ne Davis, Little League World Series Pitcher

350+ thought leaders and athletes | 40+ breakthrough ideas17 commitments to action | 8 strategies for 8 sectors

1 Powerful Roadmap for Building Healthier Communities through Sports

Read the Project Play report at www.ProjectPlay.us, follow us @AspenInstSports, and email us at [email protected].



Thank you to our partners for helping us reimagine youth sports in America.

THE NATION’S PREMIER GATHERING OF LEADERS AT THE INTERSECTION OF

SPORTS, HEALTH, AND YOUTH


Anthony Robles, Hall of Fame wrestlerAnthony Robles, Hall of Fame wrestler


Gary Bettman, National Hockey League Dr. Edwin Moses, Laureus USA and Olympic Legend

Allyson Felix, Olympian, and Mo’ne Davis, Little League World Series Pitcher

350+ thought leaders and athletes | 40+ breakthrough ideas17 commitments to action | 8 strategies for 8 sectors

1 Powerful Roadmap for Building Healthier Communities through Sports

Read the Project Play report at www.ProjectPlay.us, follow us @AspenInstSports, and email us at [email protected].


Carol Dopkin is a long time Fellow of the Aspen Institute

Carol created an Idea when she came to Aspen to introduce

Real Estate with Horse Sense It has been a successful

competitive edge – establishing relationships with clients looking

for all types of properties from condos to large ranches

The Realtor With Horse Sense!

With expertise, Carol has guided hundreds of clients to

the homes of their dreams

Always One Of ASPEN’S TOP PRODUCERS

CAROL DOPKIN and Olé – a Dutch

Warmblood Show Hunter

970.618.0187 [email protected]

www.CarolDopkin.com

Add some horsepower.













www.CarolDopkin.com














www.CarolDopkin.com


CALENDAR

Socrates Annual DinnerDate: July 11, 2015

Dinner Chairs: Laura and Gary Lauder and Mona Williams and Scott Sillers

Honoree: Jeffrey Rosen

Speaker: Reid Hoffman in conversation with Walter Isaacson

Location: The Doerr-Hosier Center, Aspen Meadows campus

aspeninstitute.org/socratesdinner

22nd Annual Summer GalaDate: August 8, 2015

Dinner Chairs: Jessica and John Fullerton

Honorary Co-Chairs: Carol and Ken Adelman

Honoree and Speaker: Ken Burns

Location: The Doerr-Hosier Center, Aspen Meadows campus

aspeninstitute.org/summercelebration

2015 Annual Awards DinnerDate: November 12, 2015

Dinner Chair: Mercedes T. Bass

Featured Speaker: Ambassador Samantha Power

Honoree: General Stanley McChrystal

Location: The Plaza Hotel, New York City

aspeninstitute.org/annualdinner

For more information on any of these events, call Melanie Levine at 800.410.3463.

Opera singer Eric Owens entertains the crowd at the 2014 Summer Celebration.

FACTS/PROGRAMSM

ich

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ds


FACTS/PROGRAMS

CONNECT WITH US

TO CONTACT INSTITUTE LEADERSSEMINARSDirectorTodd [email protected] aspeninstitute.org/seminars

HENRY CROWN

FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMManaging Director, Henry Crown Fellowship Program Tonya Hinch202.736.3523 [email protected]/crown

DONATIONS, SPECIAL EVENTS,

AND BENEFITSAssistant Director, Development Events and Special Projects Leah Bitounis 202.736.2289 [email protected]

ASPEN GLOBAL LEADERSHIP

NETWORKDep. Director, Operations & Partnerships Willow Darsie [email protected]/leadership

ASPEN COMMUNITY PROGRAMSDirector

Cristal Logan

970.544.7929

[email protected]

aspeninstitute.org/community

PUBLIC PROGRAMSVice President

Aspen Ideas Festival,

Director

Kitty Boone

970.544.7926

[email protected]

aspenideas.org

Vice President, Director

Jamie Miller


POLICY PROGRAMSDirector of Administration,

Policy and Public Programs

Donna Horney

202.736.5835

[email protected]

aspeninstitute.org/policy-work

ASPEN ACROSS AMERICAExecutive Director of National Programs Eric L. Motley202.736.2900 [email protected]

SOCRATES PROGRAMINTERNATIONAL PARTNERSVice President, Director Melissa Ingber202.736.1077 [email protected]/socrates

aspeninstitute.org/international

THE SOCIETY OF FELLOWSDirector Peter Waanders970.544.7912peter.waanders@aspeninstitute.orgaspeninstitute.org/sof

HERITAGE SOCIETYTo learn more about planned giving opportunities, please call Susan Sherwin 202.736.1088aspeninstitute.org/heritagesociety

MEDIA INQUIRIESDirector of Communications and Public Affairs Jennifer Myers [email protected]

OFFICES

HEADQUARTERSSuite 700, One Dupont Circle, NWWashington, DC 20036-1133202.736.5800

ASPEN CAMPUS1000 North Third StreetAspen, CO 81611970.925.7010

WYE RIVER CAMPUS2010 Carmichael Road, P.O. Box 222Queenstown, MD 21658410.827.7168

NEW YORK OFFICES477 Madison Avenue, Suite 730New York, NY 10022212.895.8000

Dan

Bayer


FACTS/PROGRAMS

FOLLOW US

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

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.

Join our friends at facebook.com/AspenInstitute.

To learn how to reach individual policy programs on Facebook, go toaspeninstitute.org/socialmedia.

Follow the Aspen Institute with @aspeninstitute. To follow individual Institute

programs and directors go to

Twitter.com/aspeninstitute/lists/aspen-institute.

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

Watch videos of the Institute’s events and panel discussions at

Youtube.com/aspeninstitute.

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

Join our LinkedIn Group to read more from the Institute at

Linkedin.com/company/the-aspen-institute.

Find some of the Institute’s longer publications, including the magazine, at

Scribd.com/aspeninstitute.

E-NEWSLETTERSign up for the Aspen Institute biweekly e-newsletter at aspenInstitute.org/newsletter. MULTIMEDIA CHANNELFind videos of many of the Institute’s panels and discussions, many of which are invitation-only at aspenInstitute.org/videos.

PUBLICATIONSTo find Institute publications, some of which are available for purchase or downloadable for free, go to aspenInstitute.org/publications.

THE ASPEN IDEA MAGAZINETo find and share this issue online, go to aspeninstitute.org/aspenideamag.

THE ASPEN IDEA BLOGAspen Institute directors, experts, and guest bloggers offer insight into the work of the organization ataspenInstitute.org/blog.

THE ASPEN JOURNAL OF IDEASThe Institute’s digital collection of thought-provoking analyses and opinions on critical issues is at aspen.us.

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

THE INSTITUTE ONLINE


“ To build a Culture of Health we must place well-being at the center of every aspect of life.”

RISA LAVIZZO-MOUREY, MD, MBA

President and Chief Executive O� cer

Learn more at rwjf.org/2015AnnualMessage


LAST PAGE

The intense experiences and emotions of military service can unleash creativity in the people who serve. Flying for the Navy whet Henry Crown Fellow Christopher Michel’s appetite for adventure. But it was the discipline he learned from serving that gave him the tools to become an artist. Now he combines both: Michel has channeled his love of extreme environments with the focus required to become a world-class photographer.

Michel journeyed to Antarctica for Outside magazine in 2014. "It's my favorite place on Earth," he says. This year, however, Michel is headed in the other direction: He’ll be traveling to the North Pole on a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker.

SOUTHERN EXPOSURE

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129T H E A S P E N I D E A S U M M E R 2 0 1 5The Source for Real Estate in Aspen970.925.7000 | masonmorse.com

Jim & Anita BineauBroker Associates

121 West Bleeker Street, AspenAspen’s rich architectural history comes alive in this charming Victorian home, built in 1888 and located on a double lot in the hip and historic West End. The restored two-story Victorian cottage includes three ensuite bedrooms, five fireplaces, spacious remodeled kitchen with breakfast room, enclosed courtyard, private gardens with hot tub, and front and center views of Aspen Mountain. An attached remodel guest wing features a one-bedroom apartment with living room, fireplace and a full bath. This house includes a heated 1 1/2 car garage. Located across the street from the Yellow Brick Park, this charming piece of Aspen history is within walking distance of the Aspen Institute, the Music Tent, the Gondola and Aspen’s lively downtown core. $5,175,000

Christian Messner 970.920.7380

[email protected]

Anita & Jim Bineau 970.274.9725 Anita • 970.688.0609 Jim

[email protected]

West End Classic

Contact “The Bineau Team” to schedule a showing today!


the aspen idea summer 2015

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