Lisa Kay Solomon is a futures and design educator, author, and social entrepreneur focused on helping people develop the leadership skills to become active, compassionate agents of positive change. With nearly over 20 years of design, scenario-planning, and leadership work, Lisa’s work focuses on the question: How do we help leaders and learners of all ages not just prepare for the future, but help them develop the mindsets, skillsets and practices required to shape more sustainable, inclusive, robust futures?
Named to the Thinkers50 2022 Radar List, Lisa co-authored the bestselling books Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change, and Design A Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindset and Strategy for Innovation, which has been translated into over a dozen languages. Lisa created the popular LinkedIn Learning Courses Leading Like a Futurist and Redesigning How We Work for 2021, and has written extensively on helping leaders productively navigate ambiguity through teachable and learnable practices.
Currently a Designer in Residence and Lecturer at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, Lisa teaches a variety of futures-oriented classes, including one of the d.school’s most popular courses, Inventing the Future, which exposes students to practices of applied imagination, strategic foresight, immersive world building, and creativity. Lisa’s course design utilizes immersive experiences like participating in 50 year future utopia and dystopia debates on emerging technology in order to move beyond questions of “can we build it?” to “should we build it?” As one student commented after the class, “I used to think that thinking about the future was a gene intrinsic to talent, and now I think I have the skills and tools to shape it myself.”
Lisa is also co-founder and senior advisor to Theteam.org
In 2021, she launched The Futures Series at the Stanford d.school, which brought diverse futures thinkers from around the world to share and democratize future-shaping practices. Guests included Dr. Lonny Brooks and Ahmed Best on Afrofutures, Meredith Hutchison and Aisha Bain on Ancestral Intelligence, Leah Zaidi on WorldBuilding, Minister Faust on Science Fiction and Pro-social competitions, and Riel Miller on UNESCO’s Future Literacy, among others. She also initiated experiential professional development programs such as “Afro-Rithms in Classrooms” with the National Writing Project, and workshops focused on building futures literacies such as building empathy for the future and navigating time scales and polarities.
Lisa is passionate about connecting her work between boardrooms to classrooms, bringing her work with executives and leaders at multinational companies to leaders and educators in K12 schools. She recently launched a new podcast called New View EDU, co-hosted with the National Association of Independent Schools, to help school leaders shift their posture and priorities to infuse K12 education with imagination, social and emotional wellbeing, and creative agency for the future.
Named one of ixDA’s Women of Design 2020, Lisa is also the founder and driving force beyond Vote by Design, Building America’s Teammates, and #AllVoteNoPlay, a national initiative which transforms Election Day as a day “off” from official collegiate athletic activities into a day “on” for civic engagement. Working closely with college coaches, civic educational leaders and student leaders, the experiential programs reached tens of thousands of young voters, coaches, and administrators in relevant, accessible, meaningful civic learning and action. Lisa’s work in the civics arena is focused on helping next generation voters grow in their own sense of power and agency over the futures they want to inhabit. Through creating design-driven, agency-oriented programs with a bias toward changemaking action, Lisa aims to empower young people to create a more just and inclusive world.
Connect with Lisa and David on LinkedIn
As one of the initial driving forces behind the Bridge Alliance and as chairman of the board, David L. Nevins brings business acumen, vision and a tireless this-must-and-can-be-done zeal to the burgeoning movement to bridge divides to transform the political process.
As a business leader, Nevins excels at building bridges between people and organizations from the right, left and center for civilized conversation and then action.
He co-founded the Bridge Alliance because, as he says, “No matter how well managed and how well funded any one organization is, significant political reform will not happen without an alliance to further collaborative interactions. Together we can and will raise the collective impact of all.”
Nevins is also co-publisher of The Fulcrum, a daily new publication committed to protecting democracy by educating the public on issues that matter. The Fulcrum is a key piece of a larger strategy to build a pro-democracy constituency of millions of Americans by making it easier to find and act on civic engagement opportunities. The Bridge Alliance, The Fulcrum, and Citizen Connect are all interconnected in their support of the ecosystem of our community of pro-democracy organizations and concerned and engaged citizens.
He established and continues to work with The Nevins Fellow program at The Mccourtney Institute of Democracy at Penn State University. The Nevins Fellows program allows students to complete internships at organizations that bring people together to solve common problems. In this program students begin by taking a Democratic Leadership class that introduces them to a different side of democracy—one that focuses not on campaigns and elections, but on bringing people together to work on common problems. Students learn about organizations doing this kind of work, and develop the skills necessary to facilitate conversations about community issues.
He is a member of the Aspen Institute Society of Fellows, with a focus on the Aspen Rodel Fellowship in Public Leadership.
Nevins graduated with honors in economics from Penn State in 1969 and received an M.B.A. in finance from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. He continues as President of Nevins Real Estate Management. Nevins is married to Catherine Moyal Nevins. They currently reside in Palm Beach Gardens Florida and Cape May New Jersey.
