The Aspen Institute
The Aspen Institute is a global nonprofit founded in 1949 that works toward a free, just, and equitable society through dialogue, leadership, and action on challenges facing the United States and the world.
Purpose-Driven Leadership Begins Before Strategy Is Clear
At the Resnick Aspen Action Forum, 2026 McNulty Prize winners Anna Novosad, Rudy Espinoza and Tom McDougall argued that purpose-driven leadership begins before certainty, funding or a finished strategy is in place. Novosad described building savED from an initial effort to assess damaged schools in Ukraine; Espinoza framed advocacy as a decision to take a side alongside people excluded from capital; and McDougall called for confronting the environmental and human costs omitted from market prices. Their shared case was that sustaining such commitments requires care for one’s own capacity and collaboration with others—not faith that a rescuer will arrive.
Affordable Capital Can Move Informal Entrepreneurs Into the Formal Economy
Rudy Espinoza, president and CEO of Inclusive Action for the City, argues that an economy that works for more people must bring informal entrepreneurs into formal systems, offer affordable capital to owners excluded from conventional lending, and protect businesses from displacement. His organization has deployed more than $10 million in loans and grants to support recovery and create paths to ownership, while challenging financial and property systems that, he says, deny many workers and small-business owners the chance to build lasting security.
Sustaining School Communities Is Ukraine’s Defense Against a Lost Generation
Anna Novosad, co-founder of savED, argues that Russia’s war on Ukraine targets not just school buildings but the social and educational conditions that sustain a generation’s connection to the country. With reconstruction unsafe across much of the frontline, savED has built more than 160 underground learning centers where children can study with teachers, reconnect with peers, and retain a place in their communities. Novosad’s case is that keeping education operational during war is necessary both to resist isolation and disinformation now and to preserve Ukraine’s capacity to rebuild later.
Regional Food Hubs Aim to Replace Fragile Supply Chains
Tom McDougall, founder of 4P Foods, argues that a food system built around concentrated production and long supply chains is efficient but fragile—and leaves farmers with too little of the value their food creates. His Mid-Atlantic food hub aggregates products from several hundred farms for schools, hospitals and other large buyers, reducing intermediaries and, he says, raising farmers’ average share of each customer dollar from 11 cents to 66 cents. McDougall’s broader case is for regional “supply webs” that strengthen existing procurement while building a less concentrated food system.
The Emergency Docket Is Reshaping How the Supreme Court Decides Cases
Neal Katyal and Katherine Wellington argue that persuading the Supreme Court requires more than doctrinal command: advocates must identify the particular textual, historical or institutional concern that may move individual justices under pressure. Their account of recent cases—from challenges to presidential tariffs and jury discrimination to gun regulation—also portrays a Court whose ideological divisions do not always determine outcomes, but whose turn from precedent and growing use of emergency orders have made both advocacy and judicial review less predictable.
Biomass Markets Could Finance Great Plains Aquifer Recharge
Charm founder Peter Reinhardt argues that water scarcity in the Great Plains is partly a restoration-finance problem: invasive trees and shrubs consume water and block aquifer recharge, but land managers lack a market to pay for their removal. His proposed solution is to turn unwanted biomass into biochar and bio-oil—the latter akin to the liquid-smoke flavoring associated with barbecue sauce—and use the revenue to fund invasive clearing and wetland restoration. Reinhardt says the model could return water to the Ogallala aquifer while improving soils, air quality and carbon storage.
Public Health Preparedness Must Address Pathogens, Markets, and Organized Distrust
Peter Hotez, dean of Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine, argues that public health is being weakened at every stage: climate and urbanization increase the chance of disease emergence, market failures leave vaccines without routes to the populations that need them, and organized political and commercial campaigns erode uptake where outbreaks can spread. His case for preparedness centers on earlier pathogen surveillance, vaccine production models built for low-income markets, and stronger institutional resistance to what he describes as a monetized anti-vaccine ecosystem.
Health Requires Connections Across Disciplines, Communities, and Convictions
Aspen Ideas: Health argues that health problems cannot be understood through the narrow frames of a patient, specialty, institution, or country alone. The Aspen Institute gathering convenes leaders, innovators, and advocates to examine the connections among people, communities, and the wider living system, with difficult disagreement and unplanned encounters treated as part of the work. Its premise is that a broader view of health requires participants to question their usual assumptions and remain open to perspectives they did not expect.
Communities Build Trust When They Control Their Own Stories
Community storytelling builds trust only when people retain control over whether a space is safe, how their stories are shared, and what follows from being heard, argue Claire Maracle of Words of the People, Amy Saidman of Story District, and Jeremy Williams of Freedom Dreams Foundation. Their approaches differ—from consent-centered Indigenous-language gatherings to coached public performances and community-led media production—but each rejects treating testimony as extractable content. For Williams, the governing principle is that stories move at the pace of trust, not production schedules.
“Speak Up, Sit Out, Cool Down” Targets Youth Heat Illness
Laura Schifter of the Aspen Institute argues that protecting young athletes from extreme heat requires more than telling them to hydrate: children need permission and a simple script to stop playing when symptoms emerge. The institute’s Play It Cool campaign promotes “Speak Up, Sit Out, Cool Down” as a shared response to dizziness, nausea, headaches and cramps, with active cooling such as cold towels or ice packs after leaving the field. Schifter says the aim is to make stepping out of play a normal safety decision rather than a failure to push through.
Climate Action Needs a Moral Language Beyond Partisan Identity
Rainn Wilson argues that climate action needs more than science, policy and consumer-level guilt: it needs messages that reach the politically disengaged “movable middle” and a moral language rooted in care for people and the natural world. In conversation with Zeenat Rahman, he contends that treating places, relationships and ecosystems as sacred can give people with different politics or beliefs a shared basis for protecting them.
Lower-Income Countries Need Energy Abundance, Not Basic Grid Connections
Jason Bordoff and Cassady Walters argue that development policy should aim beyond basic electricity access toward “universal energy abundance”: reliable, affordable power sufficient to support industry, transport, agriculture and modern services. Through the High Level Panel on Universal Energy Abundance, they advocate country-specific energy pathways that account for climate constraints while addressing the financing, institutional and investment risks that make energy projects far costlier in lower-income markets.
Energy Shocks Are Accelerating Clean Power and Extending Coal Use
Former U.S. energy secretary Ernest Moniz argues that the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have strengthened the strategic case for low-carbon energy while also pushing price-constrained countries from gas to coal. In conversation with TIME’s Justin Worland, he says energy security, affordability and climate policy cannot be separated: electrification and clean power can reduce exposure to imported fuels, but most global energy use still depends on fuels without affordable, scalable low-carbon substitutes. Moniz expects the world to reach a lower-carbon system eventually, but by a slower and more uneven path.
Trust Is Built When Community Input Changes Decisions
Valerie Jarrett of the Obama Foundation and Allstate chief executive Tom Wilson argue that trust is built through local work that gives people real influence and a reason to cooperate, not through appeals for consensus. Jarrett says community engagement must alter institutions’ decisions, drawing on the Obama Presidential Center’s development on Chicago’s South Side; Wilson argues that people can work together on recovery and resilience even when they disagree about climate change. Both frame durable policy and civic action as the product of relationships, reciprocity and repeated shared obligations.
Battery Chemistry Now Sets Storage Cost, Safety, and Scale
Battery researcher Chibueze Amanchukwu argues that lithium-ion’s roughly 99% cost decline has made batteries core infrastructure for electric vehicles, grid-scale renewable integration and industrial electrification, but that no single chemistry resolves every constraint. In his account, cathode choices such as nickel-based NMC and NCA or lower-cost, more thermally stable LFP determine much of a cell’s cost, performance and fire risk. The next generation, he says, will be defined less by a wholesale replacement for lithium-ion than by chemistries designed around specific limits in materials, safety, energy density and scale.
Flood Resilience Depends on Building Capacity for Excess Water
Sarah Kapnick, a former NOAA chief scientist now advising clients at a bank, argues that companies and cities must stop treating historical weather data as a reliable guide to climate risk. As extreme rainfall and flooding outgrow infrastructure built for past conditions, she says resilience requires updated probability assumptions, added water-storage capacity, community-level planning and financing arranged before disaster forces improvised decisions.
Stopping Carbon Dioxide Emissions Can Stabilize Global Temperatures
Climate scientist Kate Marvel argues that climate models are conditional accounts of human choices, not predictions of an inevitable future: continued greenhouse-gas emissions produce a hotter, more dangerous world, while stopping carbon dioxide emissions can stabilize warming. Drawing on her work and her book *Human Nature*, Marvel also rejects the idea that scientific rigor requires emotional detachment, arguing that facts and feelings both belong in communicating what is at stake on Earth—the “only good planet.”
Transmission Permitting Is the Bottleneck to U.S. Electrification
Elisabeth Moyer argues that the U.S. power system’s central challenge is no longer simply replacing coal with cheaper wind and solar, but building the transmission needed to connect new generation with rapidly growing demand. Electricity use is rising after decades of stagnation, while variable renewable output, limited storage and slow permitting leave grid operators relying more often on costly plants. In her account, decarbonization depends on electrifying more of the economy—and on whether the country can expand a grid built for a different era.
Climate Damages Will Concentrate Among Populations Least Able to Adapt
Climate economist Amir Jina argues that the damage from warming cannot be read from global temperature averages alone: health, crops, labor and energy use respond non-linearly, with harms rising sharply once local thresholds are crossed. His evidence suggests that already hot, lower-income populations face the largest losses because they are closer to dangerous heat and have less access to cooling, resilient infrastructure and other forms of adaptation. While adaptation can reduce those effects, Jina says it remains incomplete and unevenly available.
Schools and Leagues Need Clear Heat and Smoke Stop-Play Rules
Extreme heat and wildfire smoke are turning routine sports decisions into public-health and equity questions, argued Lindsey Burghardt, Sam Schmitz, Jennifer Vanos and Graham Zimmerman at Aspen Ideas: Climate. They said schools, leagues and event organizers should assess conditions at the field—not rely on citywide forecasts—then give trained adults clear authority to alter or stop play, with shade, cooling and hydration built into participation. The speakers’ broader case was that safe outdoor activity cannot depend on a family’s ability to buy private alternatives.
Enforceable Voting Rights Are the Test of American Democracy
Princeton historian Sean Wilentz argues that American democracy has been shaped by two intertwined revolutions: one against arbitrary monarchy and for popular sovereignty, the other against chattel slavery. In his account, neither the Declaration’s equality principle nor the Reconstruction Amendments secured democracy on their own; rights advanced when political mobilization was backed by enforceable federal power, and receded when that protection weakened. He places voting rights and constitutional limits on executive authority at the center of that unfinished struggle.
Phasing Out Fossil Fuels Delivers Immediate Public-Health Benefits
Edward Maibach argues that phasing out fossil fuels should be treated as an immediate public-health intervention, not only a response to future climate risks. Alongside pediatrician Lisa Patel, sanitation advocate Catherine Coleman Flowers and air-quality entrepreneur Darren Riley, he points to local benefits—from fewer asthma exposures near schools and in homes to safer water during floods—that can make decarbonization a more concrete policy choice.
Agency Neglect Risks Turning Public Ownership Into a Case for Selloffs
Former Bureau of Land Management director Tracy Stone-Manning argues that public lands will become vulnerable to privatization or transfer if federal agencies are too depleted to manage them effectively. Joined by Patagonia’s Corley Kenna and conservation advocate Benji Backer, she makes the case that stewardship must pair federal capacity with local participation, Indigenous co-management, and a broader coalition built around the places where people experience climate and environmental change firsthand.
Russia’s Proxy Network Raises Risks as the Regime Weakens
Investigative journalist Christo Grozev argues that Russia’s growing use of private forces, proxies and hired operatives has made its foreign operations less predictable and harder for Western governments to deter. Speaking with The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov after a screening of Antidote, Grozev said Moscow treats its confrontation with the West as an active war while relying on a dispersed network whose violence may exceed the control or competence of any single command structure. He also contends that corruption, economic strain and elite self-interest are eroding the system behind that threat, though a post-Putin Russia would not necessarily become democratic.