I have received the following reaction from Daniel Bennet about the session of the Millennium Fellows retreat I led at Waterloo in July:
A HUGE thank you to you for coming out to Waterloo to join us. I’m thrilled by the connections you established and the actions that were able to come out of it. This is fantastic and a best-case outcome for any session. At the end of the day, what are all our efforts to “connect” people worth if they don’t yield some sort of synergy that translates to actions afterwards. I had very positive reviews and the shear number of follow-ups you reference below is evidence of that success. I do think it was a learning experience, and for future iterations there are certainly changes we can make intentionally to structure the session differently, but honestly - it was great. Thank you again. Hopefully I will have a good sense of our funding situation for next year in October/November, at which point I would love to reconnect and discuss further collaboration.
I am very excited to stay in touch with the Fellows, and to create interfaces between them and my community. Here are some of the connections I have begun to make, and will be making:
• Ali Ahmad has written me from Beirut and we will be working together on developing common contacts in the MENA region as I pursue my desire to revive Pugwash chapters and thinking.
• I will introduce Mark Boris Andrijanic to the Council for European Studies, having been asked by him to help create a conference in Ljubljana on "The Future of Europe," with the Trilateral Commission.
• Lauren Bohn turns out to be best friends with my close alum Biz Herman. I hosted Lauren at my home for dinner a few days ago, and met her partner Andrew Gruen, who has asked me to collaborate with on the development of a stronger Gates Fellowship alumni group he has been tasked to create.
• I introduceed Priyali Sur to Shahidul Alam and George Mathew, who are working with me on Rohingya concerns to help her develop her 2017 Atlantic Council Fellows group initiative on refugee assistance. I am on the Strategy Board of both the VII Foundation and Music for Life International.
• I will help Artemis Seaford in her own refugee work. She highly regards my very good friend and alum Sasha Chanoff. I helped him create his organization RefugePoint and continue to serve as a strategic adviser for RP.
• I introduced David Martinez, my alums Matan Chorev and Dan Feldman who will be invaluable allies for the Atlantic Council.
• I introduced Ben Flatgard to Lucas Kello and his highly regarded work on cyber, The Virtual Weapon
• Maria Lourdes, is close friends with Javier El-Hage, who taught her brother in law school, and is now the Chief Legal Officer of the Human Rights Foundation, for whom I am a Strategic Advisor.
• Laura Klick has just joined the Board of Seeds of Peace. I helped design their initial curriculum, hosted their first cadre of students at Tufts, and mentored their program's first adult leaders at Boston's Outward Bound Thompson Island in 1993.
• Marta Poslad is an Humanity in Action Fellow, a program I helped grow in its earliest days with founder Judy Goldstein. She serves on HIA's Board with my alum and another very close friend, Ben Harburg, who will be one of The Trebuchet’s first funders