It has been a helluva year, hasn’t it? An overheated election season, a result that leaves us with myriad questions about our city’s future, an autumn that is alarmingly warm and dry. It’s understandable if you’re reeling right now, wondering what comes next, and what you can do.
The Philadelphia Citizen’s answer: Join us for our Ideas We Should Steal Festival on November 14 and 15, one evening (November 14) and one full day (November 15) when thought leaders from around the nation come to Philadelphia to share how they’ve implemented positive, innovative, impactful change in their cities and communities.
The lineup will include actor/activist Debra Winger, who is working to overturn Citizens United to rid our politics of dark money and undue influence; Jon Grinspan, author of The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought To Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915, walks us through how America recovered from a previous era’s rise of anti-democratic populism; Rev. Michael Eric Dyson and Jonathan Eig, authors of celebrated works about Martin Luther King, Jr., give us their take on what MLK would say about the “arc of the moral universe” today; Charlotte’s Mark Ethridge, Brookings’ Andre Perry and Sonja Trauss, an instigator of the Yes In My Back Yard movement, on solving the housing crisis; and many others who will address what we can learn from the election, how to build a vibrant middle class, how to change the trajectory for recently incarcerated, how to build coalitions among business and government and Philly and its region to lift all boats.
Audience members at The Citizen’s signature annual event leave inspired and empowered, as one attendee noted a couple years back: “I left thinking about what I had heard and observed. And I will continue to think this all into action. I am certain the audience had the same experience.”
No matter who you are, where you live, how you voted or what you’ve been through, you have the power to make change — to hope, to be a helper and to celebrate solutions to our problems when you see them. That’s what The Citizen is all about: finding solutions that transform our city into a place where everyone thrives.
The brilliant writer Rebecca Solnit shared these thoughts after the election last week: “You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”
Every day, The Citizen thinks about what is worth saving and how we can do it: democracy, community, our fellow Philadelphians and American values like free speech, tolerance and the pursuit of happiness. Join us.
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