28 May Influential Leaders From Around the Nation Gather at Bipartisan Working Group
Monday, May 28th, 2012
Over 70 of the nation’s most influential political, business, civic leaders and practitioners gathered at Hope Street Group’s annual Colloquium on May 24, 2012. This year’s meeting, themed “Beyond the Election”, gathered top leaders together for a full day of idea generation, goal setting, and collaborative problem solving at the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington, D.C. Hope Street Group is a national bipartisan organization whose mission is to mobilize our country’s vast problem-solving capacity to bring big change to the key drivers of prosperity – education, healthcare, and jobs and workforce development.
Sponsored by LinkedIn, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Optum, CityBridge Foundation, and the Walmart Foundation, 2012 Colloquium participants heard from Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) and former Michigan Governor and president of the Business Roundtable, John Engler, on the importance of collaborative policy making, innovation and job creation. Plenary sessions included the introduction of Hope Street Group’s Teacher Evaluation Playbook, an evolving “best-practices” toolkit that describes the process and resources used to engage teachers, administrators and decision makers around reinventing educator evaluation with the input of many professionals.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Thomas Friedman led a lunchtime panel including Drew Altman, President and CEO, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, John Deasy, PhD, Superintendent, Los Angeles Unified School District, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, PhD, President, American Action Forum, John Podesta, Chair and Counselor, Center for American Progress, and Tevi Troy, PhD, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute on different obstacles to economic and employment growth, from the lack of a quality public education system to the need for comprehensive immigration reform.
Julius Genachowski, Chairman, Federal Communications Commission, Carl Camden, CEO, Kelly Services, Inc., Allen Blue, VP Product Management and Co-Founder, LinkedIn and Rushika Fernandopulle, M.D., M.P.P., Co-Founder and CEO, Iora Health joined Hope Street Group board chairman Byron Auguste for a dynamic panel discussion on innovation, discussing the current and future platforms available for scaling promising ideas.
During three-hour breakout sessions, leaders participated in collaborative working groups designed for open and constructive conversations to begin generating real solutions. Participants answered questions and came up with recommendations that facilitators will turn into two-page working documents that Hope Street Group will distribute:
Jobs: initiatives that could lead to improvement in U.S labor market incentives and information, which currently lead to “job mismatch” unemployment
Education: steps that will unlock the best path forward to vastly improve our public school system by 2025
Health: ideas to reduce healthcare cost growth to the rate of GDP growth in the next 5 years and going forward
“The nation is veering away from global competitiveness, economic vitality and widespread prosperity. It will take the collaborative efforts of the nation’s greatest minds working together to get things accomplished,” says Monique Nadeau, Hope Street Group President and CEO. “Our Colloquium is designed to bring these leaders together to discuss the right ways to repair societal pillars, and then to turn these thoughts into actions.”
Hope Street Group’s major funders include the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York. Follow Hope Street Group on Twitter at @HopeStreetGroup or join us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/hopestreetgroup for up-to-date news and announcements.