Stephen Heintz

Stephen Heintz is an American nonprofit executive and public policy expert. Since 02001, he has served as president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), a family foundation with an endowment of approximately $1.2 billion that advances social change for a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world. 

Additionally, Heintz has worked for the state of Connecticut, co-founded and served as president of Dēmos, served as COO of the EastWest Institute working to support Central and Eastern Europe’s burgeoning democracies in the 1990's and later with RBF helped lay the groundwork for the Iran nuclear deal. Heintz also co-authored the report Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century and recently authored On A Logic For The Future: International Relations In The Age Of Turbulence. 

• Stephen Heintz's Wikipedia page

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson is an acclaimed American science fiction author known for his exploration of ecological and sociopolitical themes. His works, such as the Mars Trilogy and The Ministry for the Future, often center around climate change and sustainable futures. Robinson's vision of utopian possibilities has made him a leading voice in the genre of speculative fiction. 

• Kim Stanley Robinson's Wikipedia page

Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson will discuss our polycrisis, and the swift and holistic reform of global governance institutions that is needed to respond to these urgent transnational and planetary challenges we are facing. We are living in an age of exceptional complexity and turbulence. What distinguishes this period in human history is the confluence of forces— political, geo-strategic, economic, social, technological, and environmental, as well as the interactions amongst them. These crises have no regard for borders and are not responsive to solutions devised and implemented by individual nation-states or the existing ecosystem of multilateral institutions. Throughout history, we can find examples of hinge moments when human resilience, imagination, and cooperation spurred change once thought impossible. We are in a period of elasticity, a time when there is greater capacity for stretch in our conceptions of global relations and thinking about the international system. Humankind must strive to develop an international framework that can guide us toward a more peaceful, more humane, and more equitable global society, as well as a thriving planetary ecosystem.

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