Aspen Institute CEO Dan Porterfield expands vision for community engagement

Aspen Institute CEO Dan Porterfield outlined the institution’s direction, evolving role in connecting various parts of the organization, and his leadership style on the eve of the 19th Aspen Ideas Festival this week.

He has been the CEO since 2018, taking over from Walter Isaacson, after serving as president of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, since 2011.

Here is the excerpted interview:

Aspen Times: Where is the Aspen Institute headed, given its history? And then secondly, connect the dots among the different parts of the Aspen Institute. Some of these are centered in Aspen and others of which are centered around the world.

Dan Porterfield: We are known for our practical programs. We are a people and community-serving, non-profit organization valued in many communities around the world for our methods of facilitating dialogue, for our convenings that bring people together to build understanding and sometimes solutions for our practical problem-solving work on major issues. So, there are many doorways into the Aspen Institute and the members of the community of Aspen, the greater Aspen community in the Roaring Fork Valley, Colorado Valley, and wherever else we work.

And how do we build a strong, deeper, and more engaged presence in the Roaring Fork Valley? Under Walter Isaacson, the former CEO, the Aspen Institute developed more public programs where community members could attend our lectures and events, to be more inclusive. Now we are working on ways to extend our partnership to the Roaring Fork community.

I think you could look at the last 15 or 20 years of the institute’s engagement in the greater community going in stages. There was a stage in which, led by Walter Isaacson, the institute began creating more public programming and inviting community members to either come to the campus for programming, much of that led by Cristal Logan, holding some programming in Aspen or Basalt. That was one chapter when the institute was more closed and became more open, and its convenings became more inclusive.

There’s another chapter that Cristal Logan has led, where the Aspen Institute as a non-profit citizen, has begun collaborating with the other Aspen non-profit organizations, whether in the arts or managing issues like transportation and housing.

Now we’re starting a third phase, and the third phase is how can we, the Aspen Institute, extend our partnership to communities in the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys, so that we can partner with others to address unmet or emerging needs, which could be around economic opportunity youth mental wellness, environmental management wildfire prevention, and other topics. We’ve embarked upon this third chapter over the last two years through a project called the Hurst Community Initiative.

We recruited a colleague to come and work for the Aspen Institute named Evan Zislis. Evan is responsible, in partnership with Cristal, to develop the framework through which the Aspen Institute can make a productive contribution to the collective efforts of many in the broader community to address unmet or emerging needs, and he’s done that through a couple of particular projects with more to come:

A) We are convening people for collective problem identification and problem-solving.

Evan developed a seminar series through which 24 local elected officials and 24 non-profit leaders each meet once a month for a year, facilitated by Evan and the institute, for the exchange of ideas about our shared life and what we all value and how to strengthen the quality of life for all. He’s worked with some communities at their request on economic development.

Then he also facilitated other Aspen programs that are not based in Colorado to come to the Roaring Fork Valley and work in partnership. For example, we will have a project on youth physical fitness and sport called Project Play set with Tom Farrey. Tom’s program has helped communities develop action plans to involve youth in more physical fitness and sport activity in places as diverse as Hawaii, Eastern Michigan, Brooklyn, and Baltimore. We’re now doing this because of Evan. We’re now bringing Project Play to the Colorado and Roaring Fork valleys, and an action plan will be developed. We went and pitched the Colorado Health Foundation to fund it. They funded it, so we were bringing that work to collect to our home community.

B) We are joining efforts as they emerge where Evan could be helpful, like with economic development.

C) We are bringing in more Aspen programs that are working all around the country, so they can work in our community here. That’s a new chapter, and I would say a pretty big one of our engagements as a non-profit, a partner, and a citizen that’s getting my vision, our vision as a permanent part of Aspen’s engagement, as permanent as our facilities and our campus is. So that we have a permanent structured engagement forever as a non-profit partner with others to enhance the quality of life, and we use our expertise that we apply in other areas, we bring it to make sure we’re bringing it to the Roaring Fork Valley.

AT: With how rich the top 1% are getting and the image that the Aspen Institute is an elitist institution, how does the organization manage credibility?

DP: We’re two things. One is that we work in partnership with others. We do almost nothing alone. So, look across the expanse of our work. You’ll see that the Aspen Institute coordinates with Native American youth, for example, to host the Center for Native American youth, which is one of the largest, if not the largest, leadership development organizations serving the native youth community around the country.

Or differently, we work in partnerships with the community-college sector. We administer and carry out what’s called the Aspen Prize, where we award a significant financial prize and significant runner-up prizes to the five community colleges, or so it goes through a process that involves hundreds. We can document the progress we helped them create toward students graduating quickly, entering the economy and family-sustaining jobs, or transferring to four-year institutions without losing credit in partnership with the community college sector. It’s not just us doing our own thing to design this competition, which then allows the institution to improve in their priority areas and to get recognized for the different body of work we do around opportunities for youth, where our community solutions program runs, coordinates a network in more than I think 35 localities of the various programs that are serving out of work, out of school 16-to-24-year-olds.

We help knit them together, so they can share promising practices and work through evolving ways of trying to make a difference in engaging and making a difference for this group. Those are three programs with Native American youth, opportunities for youth, or with the community college sector.

Still, look at the people we serve in the communities we serve. In that case, there is a vision that our job is to help ignite human potential to ensure equity of opportunity and bring people together for understanding and to create new possibilities. So that’s the reality of what we are as an organization. We do that in many ways in places I could go on and get 15 more examples of many ways and places we are working in community co-creating and always in partnership, all only in partnership. That’s so important; many people know this and attend the Aspen Institute.

The institute also participates around the world because of our fellowship program, our global program, including Aspen Kyiv, Ukraine, where we have nine colleagues whose leadership development is about keeping the country going under this horrific act of war by Russia.

AT: Let’s dive into how you see your leadership style. You’re running this global think tank based in Washington, D.C. What is your leadership style, how has it evolved from running a university to running this level of an organization & think tank where it’s about being a conductor of a great orchestra and letting the talents emerge? What have you seen in this about the era of history we’re in with remarkably changing fast volatility with the rise of neo-fascism while trying to remain objective and stay unbiased to bring all these opposing points of views together?

DP: I’ll say that when leading a college or university, which I ran before coming to the Aspen Institute, almost by definition, the school is in a deeply competitive context. Deeply because the school is competing for better or for worse. It is competing fiercely for tuition, revenue, and for faculty. Competing for athletics to be successful and then competing for patients if it has a hospital. Then competing for prestige.

While I might wish that were different, the context of a college or university is heavily competitive, the context of the Aspen Institute is profoundly collaborative. Everything we do is in partnership with someone else. We don’t have any difficulty bringing parties together to explore what new possibilities could be me from our dialogue, so it’s a wonderful way of working. The mindset of the Aspen Institute is that there are partners everywhere with whom we will listen and engage, and that we can apply ourselves in a collaborative approach. This environment lends itself for me to be a partnership builder, a collaboration enabler who can facilitate the dots, connecting that leads to new partnerships.

OK, now, if you talk about how we’re working in a world where the pace of change is accelerating rapidly, which is disorienting and disruptive. It’s the world we live in, like the tech field, but it’s not only technology fueling a faster and faster pace of change. So we have two major methodologies that we utilize across our many programs relevant to a global society fueled by a quickened pace of change.

One of them is dialogue, and the institute has been built for almost 75 years around the premise that it is possible to design productive dialogue and that the design of dialogue is a critical quality for an organization to bring in a complex and changing world. Our designing of the context in which dialogue happens is one reason why you can see the Aspen Institute working more profoundly in the Roaring Fork Valley in the years to come. We’re in Tulsa. We’re in Miami. We’re in Newark. These are very different communities. We’re in Grand Rapids, but the work we’re doing while maybe the issues vary. The methodology of dialogue of building and designing the table around which dialogue happens and creates productive dialogue is a core strength. That strength is more relevant in more disruptive times.

The second core strength that cuts across almost everything we do is that we seek to facilitate leadership development. The development of leaders and leadership occurs in many different contexts, but if you look at our work, we have 25 programs. In one way or another, activating and supporting leadership is a critical aspect of leadership in dealing with change. So, if you start with your premise, which I share, the pace of change is growing exponentially greater. Dialogue and leadership development are two methodologies that are particularly valuable for those times, and they cut across whatever the issues of the day might be.

There’s a third one. It’s more of an emphasis, but that’s on getting and engaging younger people. That’s an area of priority for us to ensure that as we facilitate productive dialogue and values-based leadership, we reach out to more and more communities and engage younger and younger people. I say that because, again, back to your point of change, if you take the premise that our society is changing faster and faster for better or worse, you wish it were different. Still, it is critical to engage the youth in that dynamic of how they can have agency, power, influence, and voice in a world spinning like a top. We aim to extend more of our work to the young over the next few years.

AT: I studied under James O’Toole, who created the Aspen Institute’s leadership program. He’s a guru in leadership and believes leaders change things. You seem to be saying that in your leadership role, your job isn’t to create a vision and change things; it’s to take the collaborative process and continue giving it the right platform for the change to occur organically.

DP: Yeah, I think it’s more, and thank you, I believe that one way to help society is to try to contribute to the creation of the conditions where people can do their very best and most meaningful work. How do we contribute to the conditions where you can develop all you are meant to be, and you can contribute all that you hope to have to contribute and that’s part of our role is to support the development of such conditions which is always about partnership. Again, it’s never about imposing our will. We have no will to impose actually, except that we should facilitate dialogue and support the development of practical problem solving and leadership in community.

AT: We’ve watched you from the outside. Your leadership is extraordinarily humble. You also come from a deep love and appreciation for the humanities. It’s a contradiction in the sense that you’re leading. You’re also doing much fundraising through rich and powerful people. You have one of the gentlest, most disarming, deeply-thoughtful, intelligent personas. You seem to help foster this empathetic leadership role to nurture the principles you’ve discussed. Which leadership style works for Dan? What have you learned about leadership?

DP: So one, leadership is context-dependent. Be aware of the context. It matters. Leadership is service-oriented, and the notion of a servant leader is well-developed, but it’s about giving. I think values-based leadership is an important idea, and I work to carry myself consistent with those beliefs to have the feeling of integrity, which happens when you have values. You live them and feel a sense of integrity. I think that’s a wonderful north star to guide oneself as a leader, and I work to align with my values and live them daily. If you feel generally good that no one’s perfect, but you feel good about it, that gives a feeling of integrity, which reinforces, you know, playing a role as a servant leader. The leader’s role must have a theory of whom they’re working with and for. So, that theory is that everybody can make a difference as an asset. I believe in an asset-based approach to one another. Each person can make a difference, and we should try to help one another make a difference. That our collaboration and partnership are both a more effective and a more enjoyable way to work and that the younger people have a great deal to offer older people. They can help us adapt and stay connected and stay relevant.