Considering the Future: Blending Fiction and Reality

Due to a scheduling conflict, this event is now being postponed for a later date. Our apologies for the inconvenience. Please stay tuned by email for the rescheduled date.

Considering the Future: Blending Fiction and Reality

Center for Social Justice

320 E. 43rd Street

New York, NY 10017

RSVPs Closed

About the Film

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Date & Location

October

31

,

2024

5:00pm

–

9:00pm

About the Event

Conversation with Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson, Moderated by Ayad Akhtar

We live in turbulent and unprecedented times at a pivotal moment to reimagine a future we want to live in.

This conversation brings together two unique perspectives: a writer who envisions the future and a practitioner dedicated to addressing the pressing social challenges of today. Together, they will explore the interplay between fiction and reality, pragmatism and visionary utopianism. It will be moderated by Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer award-winning playwright and author of Homeland Elegies.

Join us for a dynamic and timely event, blending imaginative visions of the future with bold, practical approaches in a year critical for multilateralism and international cooperation. Our speakers will examine the "logic of the past" versus the "logic of the future," offering valuable insights for policymakers, philanthropists, and multi-sector leaders working to shape a better tomorrow.

The event is co-sponsored with Ford Foundation, Philanthropy New York, NYU’s Center on International Cooperation (CIC), and NYU SPS Heyman Center.

Agenda

9:30 a.m. - Registration Open
10:00 a.m. - Program Followed by Q&A
11:30 a.m. - Event Ends

Speakers

Amy Griffin

Amy Griffin is the Founder and Managing Partner of G9 Ventures, a private fund that invests in generation-defining brands. G9 has partnered with over 60 companies, including Bobbie, Bumble, Evvy, Kitsch, Midi Health, On Running, Oura, Saie, and Spanx. Amy is an enthusiastic champion of women with more than 70% of G9’s portfolio companies being female founded or led. She is known for her ability to help build brands by fostering community, creating authentic connections, and solving problems.

Amy serves on the Board of Directors of Bumble, Spanx, and Gagosian and is a member of the Board of Trustees of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Women’s Board of the Boys Club of New York, and the Advisory Board of the One Love Foundation. She is a frequent speaker at notable conferences and events, including those hosted by The New York Times, The Information, JPMorgan, among others. Amy’s debut memoir, The Tell, about the transformative power of sharing one’s story, will be published in March 2025.

Amy graduated with a BA in English from the University of Virginia where she was Captain and MVP on the women’s volleyball team. She lives in New York City with her husband, John, and their four children.

Mariska Hargitay

Emmy-award winning actress Mariska Hargitay plays Captain Olivia Benson on the NBC series Law and Order: SVU, now in its record-breaking twenty-sixth season, where she is also an Executive Producer and director.

Mariska’s role on SVU awakened her to burdens of shame, blame and isolation that survivors of trauma often carry, leading her to create the Joyful Heart Foundation in 2004. Joyful Heart’s mission is to transform society’s response to sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse, support survivors’ healing, and end this violence forever. At the heart of the foundation’s advocacy work is the “End the Backlog” campaign, aimed at eliminating the backlog of hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits in the US, reforming the system that made the backlog possible, and supporting survivors in their pursue of the justice they deserve.

She produced I AM EVIDENCE, an HBO documentary film on the topic that premiered in April 2018 and received an Emmy for “Best Documentary” at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards in September 2019. Mariska also co-produced EMANUEL, a documentary about the Charleston church shooting which premiered in June 2019, and MY BEAUTIFUL STUTTER, a documentary about a summer camp for young people who stutter.

Kenneth Roth

Kenneth Roth is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. Until August 2022, he served for nearly three decades as the executive director of Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading international human rights organizations, which operates in some 100 countries.

A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Roth has conducted numerous human rights investigative and advocacy missions around the world, meeting with dozens of heads of state and countless ministers. He is quoted widely in the media and has written hundreds of articles on a wide range of human rights issues, devoting special attention to the world’s most dire situations, the conduct of war, the foreign policies of the major powers, the work of the United Nations, and the global contest between autocracy and democracy.

Roth’s first book, Righting Wrongs, offers an insider’s view of the strategies used by Human Rights Watch to put pressure on governments to respect human rights, drawing on his years of experience.

Martín Abregú

Martín Abregú is vice president for International Programs. As such, he works on designing and implementing a vision for the foundation’s work at the global level, seeking to respond to the global drivers of inequality by bringing new voices and perspectives into the international arena. He works with teams in the US and around the globe, including 10 regional offices and six international programs: Civic Engagement and Government; Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice; Natural Resources and Climate Justice; Technology and Society; Future of Work(ers); and Global Governance.

Martín joined Ford in 2000, serving as a program officer for human rights and citizenship in the Andean Region and Southern Cone office, based in Santiago, Chile. Since then, he has held various positions at the foundation. He was appointed program vice president in 2013 and vice president for International Programs in February 2019.

Stephen Heintz, President and Chief Executive Officer, Rockefeller Brothers Fund

Stephen Heintz is an American nonprofit executive and public policy expert. Since 2001, 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.

Previously, he co-founded and served as president of Dēmos, a think tank dedicated to developing a more inclusive democracy.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Author, The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American novelist, widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction and increasingly, climate fiction. His work has been described as humanist or literary science fiction and his use of scientific accuracy and non-fiction descriptions places him in the hard sci-fi genre.

Robinson has published more than 20 novels including his much honored Mars trilogy and The Ministry for the Future. Robinson studied under Ursula K Le Guin and earned a Ph.D. in literature from UCSD with a dissertation on the works of Philip K. Dick.

Ayad Akhtar (Moderator), Pulitzer Award-Winning Playwright and Author

Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Akhtar is the author of Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.), which The Washington Post called “a tour de force” and The New York Times called “a beautiful novel…that had echoes of The Great Gatsby and that circles, with pointed intellect, the possibilities and limitations of American life.” His first novel, American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), was published in over 20 languages.

As a playwright, he has written Junk, Disgraced, The Who & The What, and The Invisible Hand.

Registration & Attendance Details

—Registration is required for this event and RSVPs are non-transferable. Walk-ins are not permitted at this time.

—All members of the public must present a photo ID matching the registration name.

—Bags are subject to security screening; large bags will need to be checked in the lobby.

—Important information about this event will be sent to the email address used to register. If you do not see the email, please check your spam folder.

—Email events@fordfoundation.org with any questions.

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