The wisest organizational stewards understand that long-lived institutions work more like a forest than a machine. They lean on the founding insight of biomimicry — that nature, after 3.8 billion years of trial and error, has found solutions for many of the problems lasting systems ultimately face: how to grow without collapsing, how to pass something durable from one generation to the next, and how to adapt without losing the thread of who you are.
A steward who thinks like an ecologist rather than an engineer starts by asking “what phase is this system actually in, and what does it need right now?” It’s the question that Rebecca Lendl asked all of us — board, staff, supporters, and the long-term thinking community as a whole — after arriving at The Long Now Foundation at the end of 02022. It was a pivotal phase for Long Now — the founding generation of leadership had begun to step back after more than a quarter century. By weaving together the common threads of often disparate answers, Rebecca led a wildly ambitious four-year chapter of institutional evolution. The transformed institution emerges from its first generational transition stronger, sharper, and with a deeper connection to the ever-growing coalition that takes the long-term past and long-term future seriously.
The wisest stewards are also able to recognize the moment when stepping away will invite something new to grow. After leading The Long Now Foundation through this pivotal transition, Rebecca Lendl will step down as Executive Director in September 02026. She will join The Council at Long Now, where she will continue to contribute her wisdom to the organization she helped renew.
Rebecca’s career has revolved around this kind of transformational work — helping organizations understand who they are so they can figure out where they are going and how to really connect with their community. She has supported institutions including Creative Time, Headlands Center for the Arts, Creative Commons, and the Center for Humane Technology through pivotal moments of growth and transformation. At Long Now, she found a mission that demanded everything she had learned.
“Rebecca’s human-centered leadership gave everyone on the Long Now staff a deeper understanding of what they were capable of, both individually and collectively. She came into a close knit team — many staffers have been at Long Now for over a decade — and found ways to unlock a whole new level of skill and collaboration,” said James Home, Long Now’s Director of Communications and Design. “We just know how to do this work in a completely different way now.”
Centering all of you — our whole community of long-term thinkers — is at the heart of that. Under Rebecca’s leadership, we have reshaped our programming, publications, and partnerships to better serve the people brought together by long-term thinking.
Here are some highlights from her tenure.
Gathering our scenius
Long Now cofounder Brian Eno has a word for what happens when a community begins generating ideas that no one individual could have produced alone: scenius. It’s the collective intelligence and intuition of a cultural scene. It’s what you feel when you attend Long Now Talks. Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, the lecture series is one of Long Now’s signature programs and an early focus for Rebecca. An expanded curatorial vision led to sold out shows, bringing a whole new generation into the Long Now fold. Attendees are met with a reimagined live-event experience at Fort Mason Center, led by Programs Manager Juliann Witt, with receptions in the Long Now-themed lobby of the Cowell Theater and cocktails and conversation afterwards at The Interval. This intimate conviviality reliably presents the rare opportunity for the community to dive deeper into the ideas presented on stage.
Recognizing how much the long-term thinking community needs moments like this to connect, Long Now also launched Salons and Happy Hours. These participatory special events remove the stage component altogether, nurturing new and lasting connections between the participants.
Gatherings like these need a supporting infrastructure. Rebecca prioritized a comprehensive redesign of The Interval, Long Now’s award-winning bar, cafe, and community space. Led by Interval Director Ty Caudle, the staff of The Interval are Long Now’s everyday ambassadors. Downstairs, a new exhibition of long-term thinking greets visitors — many of whom are encountering Long Now's ideas for the first time. Upstairs, storage and office space was reimagined to become a private lounge and gallery for coworking and special events. People noticed the transformation — The Interval became one of San Francisco’s most sought-after event spaces and was recognized as San Francisco Magazine's Best Cocktail Bar and a featured destination in “36 Hours in San Francisco” by the New York Times.
Telling our story
One of Rebecca’s early insights was that Long Now’s 30-year history — and the emergence of long-term thinking itself — held untold stories that wanted to be unlocked in service of the present moment. Among her first moves was founding a communications team built around storytelling. Led by James Home, the team reimagined every aspect of how Long Now engages the long-term thinking community.
The signature Long Now Talks podcast and YouTube channel were refreshed and rebranded. New short video highlights, carefully tailored to each social media platform, introduced more than 50K new subscribers to long-term thinking practices. Pre-talk primers introduce the frontier ideas our speakers present, deepening the impact of every episode.
In the same way walking into The Interval now feels like an embodied experience of long-term thinking, the new Pace Layers Annual Journal lets you hold the practice in your hands. Led by Editorial Director Ahmed Kabil and launched in 02024, the 280 page compendium immediately sold out its initial print run. Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand proclaimed it “perfectly done in every way.” We doubled the print run for the 02025 issue and are hard at work on the next one, due out in November.
A comprehensive redesign of the Long Now website turned it into a living library of long-term thinking. It now offers a three decade archive of Long Now Talks, Ideas, and Projects. Long Now’s beloved newsletter, now published each solstice and equinox, has a consistent new design packed with links to emerging long-term thinking practices worldwide and 10,000 new subscribers.
Rebecca also recognized the storytellers in our community. She invited photographer and Long Now Talks Alum Christopher Michel to become an Artist-in-Residence in 02025. His instantly recognizable portraits of Long Now speakers, board, and staff are now an essential part of our storytelling and long-term archive.
Expanding our horizon
Under Rebecca’s leadership, Long Now deepened its connection to long-term thinkers and builders operating at civilizational scale, becoming a true institutional home for these creators and their projects. Long Now Labs, launched in 02026 and led by Director of Strategic Initiatives Denise Hearn, expands on Long Now’s history of incubating amazing projects like Revive and Restore in a way that builds institutional capacity over time. It provides a visible structure for these cross-disciplinary collaborations around frontier ideas, creating tools, artifacts, and frameworks that expand humanity's capacity to navigate the unknown and preserve possibilities for future generations.
Long Now’s work can sometimes live in far-off places, and Rebecca empowered the team to make it more visible and accessible. Centuries of the Bristlecone, a decade-long collaboration with conceptual artist Jonathon Keats and produced in partnership with the Nevada Museum of Art, is an arboreal clock and land art installation at 11,000 feet on Long Now’s Nevada Bristlecone Preserve. Led by Special Projects Director Andrew Warner, the museum exhibit opened to the public in 02025. Rebecca introduced the project in the opening panel at the museum’s Art + Environment Summit. Long Now produced making-of documentary premiered in 02026 at CineGlobe in Switzerland and won best documentary short at the Denali Film Festival.
Strengthening our foundation
All of this work rested on a tremendous undertaking of institutional renewal. Rebecca drove an ambitious period of financial growth, engaged new lead funding partners, and expanded our membership base. She guided staff and board through a strategic planning process that clarified Long Now’s vision, identity, and biggest opportunities at the dawn of its second quarter century. Advancing our long-term institutional legacy, Long Now’s permanent archives were established at Stanford University Libraries and the Nevada Museum of Art, led by Community & Collections Director Danielle Engelman. Rebecca reorganized and invested deeply in the team itself. Long Now’s people and operations are now ably led by Director of Operations Brooke Clinton. The team culture she cultivated and the staff she assembled — high-performing, service-oriented, and deeply committed to the mission — are the surest sign that what she built throughout her tenure will endure.
Rebecca also established The Council at Long Now in service of institutional endurance. The Council brings together distinguished public leaders with Long Now emeritus board members and alumni to serve as ambassadors for long-term thinking and responsibility.
Long Now Board Chair Mick Costigan reflected, “Rebecca met the challenges and opportunities of her leadership with rare clarity about what each moment required. Rebecca’s legacy isn’t any single program, it’s a strengthened team, a renewed institution, and a widened community, which together made everything in her tenure possible and which will keep making things possible long after she leaves in September. The board is deeply grateful that The Council keeps Rebecca’s wisdom close.”
Always in the spirit of setting new things in motion, Rebecca concludes her tenure as Executive Director by spearheading Entangled Intelligences, a special event exploring the frontiers of interspecies intelligence.
Looking back on her tenure and forward towards Long Now’s future, Rebecca offered her own reflection. “Lasting systems survive and thrive by passing something durable from one generation to the next. My time as Executive Director was dedicated to preparing for that very handoff, ensuring that Long Now could adapt through this first generational transition while protecting its core essence. We have cultivated a robust, capable team and community — passing the torch now feels like watching a mature ecosystem naturally evolve. As I step down from leadership, I do so with the immense joy of seeing an institution that doesn’t just endure, but dynamically regenerates — strong, self-sustaining, and ready for its next quarter century.”
The first generational transition of a long-lived institution is the most challenging one. Long Now is profoundly grateful that ours was led by a steward as thoughtful, talented, and human-centered as Rebecca Lendl. We emerge strengthened, sharpened, and deeply committed to serving the needs of the long-term thinking community long into the unknowable future. Thank you, Rebecca.
Rebecca Lendl continues as Executive Director through early September 02026. The board’s search for Long Now’s next Executive Director is underway; we will share updates with our community as it progresses.
