Steffen is the founder of Worldchanging, a popular website on sustainability. Every day, Steffen and his team of journalists and practitioners deliver bright new ideas that The New York Times lauds as “solutions-focused reporting on innovation.” The ideas range from the small and clever to the huge and inspiring—and all are proof that the tools and models to build a better future are already here. Steffen brings them all together on the site, in his talks and in his edited book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century.

This lecture is free and open to the public.

From Ground Zero in New York to ground zero in Kabul, to police stations, refugee camps, snipers’ roosts, subway platforms and theater stages, NPR's Peabody Award-winning Scott Simon has reported from all 50 states and every continent. He has covered 10 wars, hundreds of campaigns, sieges, famines, hurricanes, earthquakes, civil wars, scandals, state funerals and opening nights.

This lecture is free and open to the public.

Edelman has been an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life. Under her leadership, CDF has become the nation’s strongest voice for children and families. The Leave No Child Behind® mission of the Children's Defense Fund is to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities. Edelman began her career in the mid-‘60s when, as the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar, she directed the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund office in Jackson, Miss.

This lecture is free and open to the public.

Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, has been called the most important Irish poet since William Butler Yeats. His writing career began at Queen’s University in Belfast, where he published work in the university magazines under the pseudonym Incertus.

This lecture is free and open to the public.