How Asheville Ideas Fest is changing the world – one idea at a time
Asheville Ideas Fest promotes civil dialogue at second annual conference.
By WP Creative Group
April 19, 2023
In February 2022, Adrienne Shoch moved to Asheville, North Carolina on a whim.
A longtime DC native, she fell in love with the city’s outdoor attractions while house-sitting for a friend, and decided to plant new roots. Even better than views of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains, she says, are the locals.
“Asheville has an interesting population of transplants,” she said. “In DC, I find that the topics of conversation are problems – what’s going on? What’s wrong with the world? In Asheville, people talk about their interests – I’m going kayaking or hiking. There’s this festival. There are more creative conversations bringing people together.”
Shoch was looking to establish her social circle when she came across Asheville Ideas Fest, a four-day conference hosted by the University of North Carolina Asheville. The schedule included a bevy of events with global thought leaders discussing everything from environmentalism and the prison system to public health and politics.
Intrigued, Shoch registered immediately. “The University is actually on the other side of the mountain that I live on,” she said. “I bought my house and I never even knew we’ve got this little gem, in the city limits of Asheville.”
Co-founded by Kirk Swenson, Vice Chancellor of University Advancement at UNC Asheville and former Chancellor Nancy Cable, Asheville Ideas Fest intends to create space for civil dialogue. The idea was partially inspired by Storytime, a small social group Swenson joined in 2020 that has met for 30 years with one goal in mind: “to share a drink together and talk about the things that truly matter.”
“The Storytime invitation came along at a time when I felt I was becoming more insular in my views and beliefs, and losing the opportunity to have conversations with people who see the world differently,” Swenson said. “Losing our ability to engage in civil dialogue would be deeply dangerous for our country. This discourse is at the heart of Asheville Ideas Fest.”
The inaugural event, held in June 2022, convened 450 attendees for deep listening, respectful discussion and relaxation, all while enjoying the food, craft beverages and invigorating mountain air of Asheville. Rowena McClinton, professor emerita of history in Illinois, was one of the attendees.
“I received an outline of the program a couple of months ahead of time and it just sounded so exciting,” McClinton recalled. “The program addressed issues that I was extremely interested in, like incarceration, what programs are available for people who are incarcerated, and what programs are available once they are in the free world.”
Asheville Ideas Fest featured a discussion with award-winning filmmaker Lynn Novick and graduates of the prison education program featured in her documentary series “College Behind Bars.” Novick, Rodney Spivey Jones and Reginald Dwayne Betts participated in a panel discussion about the film and the importance of education for the incarcerated.
Another speaker of interest to both McClinton and Shoch was environmental thought leader Dr. Bill McKibben, Professor Emeritus at Middlebury College, who gave a keynote address focused on environmental justice.
“The environment is a dark conversation, but he brought this element of lightness,” said Shoch. “When we get hammered with heavy topics, I think our nervous system takes over and we can go into the spiral of negativity. Having the ability to take a really deep, difficult topic and keep the audience engaged through lightness – I thought it was just really well done.”
McClinton also attended a moderated discussion featuring Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Corbett was formerly the scientific lead for the Coronavirus Vaccines & Immunopathogenesis Team at the National Institutes of Health.
“Dr. Corbett led her team to discover the COVID-19 vaccine – it was incredible to hear from her,” said McClinton. “The transparency that she brought to her talk really resonated with me. I had a chance to speak to her after the discussion, and I’ll just never forget her presence.”
The discussion inspired McClinton to bring that same transparency to her own work.
“Being in academics, I brought back this urgency to even be more transparent in my publications,” she said. “I’ve talked to my publisher about digitizing and making available some of the writings that I have published so that a wider world can have access to what I have done, rather than having somebody pay for that piece of writing.”
Shoch was also influenced by Dr. Corbett’s comments on the trust doctors should build with patients. “What I brought home was, how do I build trust in my interactions with my community, with my clients, even with my kids’ friends?” Shoch said.
To Swenson, that’s exactly what Asheville Ideas Fest is about–bringing ideas home.
“I think about it like seeds on a dandelion,” he said. “We bring these 450 people together and we help them recognize the value in engaging with different perspectives, and then – puff, off they go back to their own communities. My hope is that they bring that joyfulness and that creative energy back to the places where they live and seed it there as well.”
The 2023 Ideas Fest is slated for June 13-17, and registration is currently open. This year’s attendees can look forward to hearing from such captivating speakers as: Sanjay Gupta, Emmy Award-winning Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN; Juju Chang, Emmy Award-winning co-anchor of ABC News’ Nightline; Kwame Alexander, New York Times bestselling author and Newbery Medal winner; and Tom Friedman, bestselling author and Foreign Affairs Columnist for The New York Times.
Swenson says this year’s conference will partner with the Braver Angels Foundation, a political depolarization group that facilitates conversations between people on different ends of the political spectrum. Participants can attend a Red/Blue Workshop to learn and practice a framework for better understanding one another’s positions and discovering shared values.
“We’re working to create an intellectual community for those four and a half days,” said Swenson. “You’re going to hear things that you won’t agree with, things that you can truly learn from. We’re going to give you a framework for how to deal with that, because many of us simply don’t have a lot of practice at it.”
The conference schedule allows participants to explore the city of Asheville during afternoon breaks. Activity options include stand-up paddleboarding on the French Broad River, taking a historic Asheville walking tour or visiting one of the city’s many breweries.
“I think people will look back decades from now and say, ‘I learned something about myself and other people that’s changed the way I operate in the world and opened me up to a different set of perspectives,’” he said. “I hope that people will reflect back on their experience many years down the road and go, ‘Boy, I was really glad I was there.’”
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