IDEAS: the Magazine of the Aspen Institute Summer 2017

Henry Crown Turns 20, the Stevens Initiative takes learning global, and more.

More than 30 experts from a variety of disciplines came together to discuss today’s most pressing issues.

A dialogue about the widening opportunity gap as well as the innovative solutions to inequality taking root around the country.

Questlove and other community leaders motivate Aspen Challenge teens to solve the problems they see in their own communities.

The Aspen Institute awarded Gates its 2016 Public Service Award to honor the contributions in global health and education that she and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have made around the world.

In February, the Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series invited Joichi Ito for a conversation about his new book, Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future. Institute CEO Walter Isaacson spoke with Ito—the director of the MIT Media Lab as well as an online activist, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist—about democracy and internet freedom in the wake of the contentious 2016 presidential election.

the Institute honored Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor for her distinguished career in judicial service with the seventh annual Preston Robert Tisch Award in Civic Leadership.

Why have black poverty rates remained static since the end of the civil-rights movement? When journalist Michele Norris brought her Race Card Project to the Institute, she immediately made examinations of race, culture, and identity central parts of the Aspen idea. “We want to try to engage people to talk across difference, to try to examine deeply entrenched narratives, so that we better understand how those narratives can confine or define communities,” she told an Institute audience in January. For her initiative’s first event, Norris sat down with Institute Trustee Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Harvard professor and filmmaker’s latest film project is Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise, a look at black history in the modern era.

Aspen Global Health and Development’s Alliance for Artisan Enterprise helps artisans around the world develop creative strategies, remove barriers to success, and thrive. Here, three members share the results of that work—on their businesses and on the artisans who drive them.

For her Fellowship project, Parzick built and launched the NetSpend Foundation, whose mission is to provide customers equal access to education, skill-building, and resources that can increase their earning power and improve the quality of their lives.

Every year, thousands of Americans enroll in community colleges with the goal of continuing on to a four-year college or university to earn a bachelor’s degree. Yet, too often, exceptional community-college students don’t reach that goal. Through no fault of their own, they fall short of their dreams—and communities across the US miss out on their talents. The Institute’s College Excellence Program works with community colleges and four-year institutions to build clearer bridges and to increase access for low- and moderate-income students.

The Henry Crown Fellowship Celebrates 20 Years of Leadership.

The Stevens Initiative creates a common classroom for students around the world.

How can we rebuild the keystone of our government and institutions?

A library can be a gateway to things unimagined.

Can systems develop to allow economic actors—businesses and investors—to do both well and good?

Each year, the Alma and Joseph Gildenhorn Book Series brings in the authors of some of the world’s best newly released books for deep explorations of culture, history, technology, and the political zeitgeist. Hosted at the Institute’s Washington, DC, headquarters, this year the series brought ten unique voices to our stage to discuss Asia policy, life on Alaska’s frontier, modernity’s ceaseless acceleration, foreign-affairs chaos, Republican chaos, the resonance of Emmett Till, the big business of big health care, and America’s surging war machine.