New America NYC and NYU's McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research have teamed up to produce an inaugural conversation on June 18th to highlight the necessity of early and sustained census preparation in keeping our democratic institutions equitably funded and accessible. 

Imagine a centralized database replete with your personal information that links together your and your family’s vital health, education, and social welfare records. Now imagine the database includes an entire country’s population.

Fifty years ago this year, Denmark launched the world's first nationalized big data project. The country's Civil Personal Registration (CPR) system assigns every resident a "digital ID" that directly connects them with the Danish state to facilitate government-citizen interactions from birth to death and everywhere in between. Originally created to render tax collection  and the distribution of social benefits more efficient, the system has become a popular and benevolent instrument in Denmark built on the values of trust in government and sense of community.

Now similar data infrastructures—often built by private sector platforms—are being applied across the globe, but in a climate in which data breaches are growing more frequent and more severe, their implications must adapt to the opportunities—and account for the challenges—of twenty-first century technology. How can citizens ensure their personal data isn't vulnerable to hacking and that their privacy rights are being upheld? What safeguards must government and the private sector take on to guarantee data is used and stored securely? What do CPR-modeled platforms mean for the future of digital democracy?

Join New America NYC, in partnership with the Consulate General of Denmark in New York and Columbia University's European Institute, for a set of conversations on the past, present, and future of digital identity—and the measures we need in place to ensure its use for good.

Elana Broitman @elanabroitman
Director, New America NYC

Tom Freston
Board Member and Chair, New America NYC Advisory Council

Don Thibeau @4thibeau
Executive Director, OpenID Foundation

Zia Khan @ZiaKhanNYC
Vice President, Initiatives and Strategy, The Rockefeller Foundation

Michael Ibach
Chief Analytics Officer, United Nations

Tara Nathan @Thetaranation
Executive Vice President, Public-Private Partnerships, MasterCard

Louise Matsakis @lmatsakis
Staff writer, WIRED 

Jacob Mchangama @JMchangama
Founder and CEO, Justitia

John Paul Farmer @johnpaulfarmer
Director, Technology and Civic Innovation, Microsoft

Amanda Graham @BCCBlockchain
Co-founder and Chief Services Officer, Blockchain for Change

David K. Park @davidchungpark
Dean of Strategic Initiatives, Arts & Sciences, and Faculty Member, Data Science Institute, Columbia University

Natasha Singer @natashanyt
Technology reporter, The New York Times 

This event is presented in partnership with the Consulate General of Denmark in New York with additional support from the European Institute at Columbia University.

There are no good guys in this story, including me. – Dan David, GeoInvesting

After the 2008 financial collapse, U.S. investors began scouring global markets for new opportunities for high returns, and they turned to China to take part in its explosive economic growth. Looking beyond profits that seemed too good to be true, a band of rogue Wall Street outsiders uncovered a massive web of multibillion-dollar fraud.

From the producers of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, The China Hustle takes a deep dive into China's economic miracle to reveal how many ordinary Americans who want to invest in China's dynamic growth—through pension funds, retirement savings, and mutual funds—are unaware they could be holding billions of dollars of junk.

Academy-Award® nominee Jed Rothstein follows Dan David and a group of whistleblower investors who go to China to discover a landscape ripe for fraud. Working with Chinese investigators who put their freedom at stake, they expose hundreds of small Chinese companies that have vastly overvalued their assets, revenues, and and future prospects—representing 1.1 trillion dollars in market value on the NYSE and NASDAQ—and the American companies willing to turn a blind eye while they rake in huge profits.

Join New America NYC for an advanced screening of The China Hustle and a conversation with the film's director, key subject, and experts that considers the accountability and transparency needed to protect investors and asks: what will happen if the China bubble bursts?

Jed Rothstein @boerumhillfilm
Director, The China Hustle

Dan David
Chief Investment Officer, F.G. Alpha Management, and Co-founder, GeoInvesting
Featured subject, The China Hustle

Dune Lawrence @DuneLawrence
Investigative Reporter, Bloomberg & Businessweek

Jiayang Fan @JiayangFan
Staff writer, The New Yorker

Optimism is a moral choice. – Dr. Jim Yong Kim

Thirty years ago, as much of the world was being ravaged by horrific diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, three young people, not yet out of medical school, set out to provide healthcare for Haiti's rural poor. They went on to spend the next three decades on the frontlines of health crises across the globe.

Paul Farmer, Jim Yong Kim, and Ophelia Dahl came together to deliver a world-class level of care — the kind they would expect for their own families — and build health clinics in remote areas ignored by everyone else. Their idea was controversial and revolutionary: to create partnerships with the patients themselves by training ordinary villagers as healthcare workers. Despite enormous resistance from the outside world, they made groundbreaking advances in combating the life-threatening conditions of impoverished communities and against the spread of pandemics including drug-resistant TB, HIV/AIDS, and Ebola.

Their inspiring vision is the subject of Bending the Arc, a new film by Academy Award® nominees Kief Davidson, Pedro Kos, and Cori Shepherd Stern. Through candid interviews and never-before-seen archival footage, the film profiles the fiercely dedicated group of doctors and activists as they deliver the highest-quality care in the most unlikely places.

Join New America NYC for a screening of Bending the Arc and a conversation with global health practitioners and experts to ask: is healthcare a privilege for those who can afford it or a basic human right?

Nina Fialkow
Executive Producer, Bending the Arc
Chair, Massachusetts Cultural Council

Natalia Kanem, MD, MPH @Atayeshe
Executive Director, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)

Alishya Mayfield, MD, MPH
Senior Clinical Adviser on Strategy, Partners in Health (PIH)

Anatole Manzi, PhD
Director of Clinical Practice, Partners in Health (PIH)

Donna Patterson, PhD @PharmacySenegal
International Security Fellow, New America
Associate Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies, Delaware State University

Lori Adelman @Ladelman
Executive Director, Feministing
Director of Youth Engagement, Women Deliver

This event is presented in partnership with Tumblr.

In January 2013, on an early morning in Guatemala City, soldiers with automatic weapons are standing on street corners. A long line of Mayan women and men head into the high court, an institution historically dominated by the interests of a small white elite minority. Just three decades earlier, the ruling elite, with U.S. backing, engineered a coup that would topple a democratically elected government and unleash a dark period of repression and massacres. 200,000 mostly indigenous people were murdered; 45,000 urban artists, intellectuals, and activists disappeared. 

Thirteen years later, the Mayan survivors and activists prevailed: former president Efraín Ríos Montt was brought before the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity and  a citizen uprising forced a corrupt president, Otto Perez Molina, to resign. 

This heroic story is the subject of 500 Years, the third installment in Director Pamela Yates’s The Resistance Saga trilogy. Focusing on universal themes of racism, power, corruption, and social justice, 500 Years tells the story through the eyes of the majority indigenous Mayan population in Guatemala. It highlights how the ongoing struggle for human rights galvanized activists, especially women, to emerge as eloquent, powerful leaders of their community and country.

Join New America NYC for a screening of 500 Years and a conversation with the filmmaker, activists, and global experts about justice in the face of structural racism and how the force of sustained nonviolent resistance can make it possible for right to make might.

Pamela Yates @pameladyates
Director, 500 Years

Monica Aleman Cunningham @ACunningham2013
Senior Program Officer, Building Institutions and Networks (BUILD), Ford Foundation

Andrea Ixchíu @Andreakomio
Mayan activist featured in 500 Years

Many American workers are unwell. They live with serious economic insecurity; succumb to diabetes, depression, and addiction at alarming rates; and struggle to balance the conflicting needs of their employers, their families, and their own well-being. That outlook won’t improve until we think of health as the driver of prosperity — not just the product of it.

In the U.S., we spend extravagantly on treating illness but spend proportionally less on keeping people healthy than most developed nations. But research shows a strong correlation between healthy communities with little economic disparity and healthy economies. People live longer in the nation's more equal states. What can we do to change the country's focus from health care as a cost with limited returns, to health as an investment that pays off over the long term — socially and economically? How can we better elevate health as a policy priority?

Join New America NYC for a conversation on the future of health and wellness — and what both governments and the private sector can do to improve its outlook.

Esther Dyson @edyson
Executive Founder, Way to Wellville, and health investor

Dr. Herminia Palacio @HerminiaPalacio
Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, City of New York

Manmeet Kaur @ManmeetKaurNY
Founder and Executive Director, City Health Works

Melanie Lavelle @Mglavelle
Founder, Benefit Kitchen

Dan Goldberg @DanCGoldberg
Senior Health Reporter, Politico

The United States and China are in a race to build the world’s first quantum machine, and whoever crosses the finish line first will attain global dominance for generations to come.

In The Quantum Spy, a new genre-bending thriller, New York Times bestselling author and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius tells the fictional story of a hyper-fast quantum computer—the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb—able to shred any encryption and break any code in existence. When top-secret U.S. research labs are compromised by a suspected Chinese informant, CIA officer Harris Chang sets in motion a history-altering investigation that forces him to question he thinks about loyalty, diplomacy, and the primacy of truth.

Couched in the real-world technological arms race, the novel asks pivotal questions about contemporary national security issues—the competition to achieve quantum computing technology, the high stakes rivalry between the U.S. and China, and the conduct of spycraft in the digital age.

Join New America NYC for a conversation with David Ignatius and Karen Greenberg on the fictional tale of cyber espionage—and what it tells us about the real-world threats with which national security policy must contend.

David Ignatius @IgnatiusPost
Columnist, The Washington Post

Author, The Director and The Quantum Spy

Karen Greenberg @KarenGreenberg3
Director, Center on National Security, Fordham University School of Law
Author, Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State

Today, almost half of the American workforce earns less than $15 per hour and a third of working-age men are either unemployed or unable to keep a family of four out of poverty. Few have sufficient savings to retire with, while businesses continue to push healthcare and other social safety costs onto their employees. Yet American companies are far from struggling. Is the contract between employee and employer broken?

In his new book, The End of Loyalty, Rick Wartzman chronicles the erosion of the relationship between American companies and their workers through the histories of four major American employers — General Motors, General Electric, Kodak, and Coca-Cola. Wartzman argues that big businesses once took responsibility for providing their workers and retirees with an array of social benefits, but in a twenty-first century economy turbocharged by the pace of technology, access to a good, stable job no longer guarantees access to the American Dream. The cause, he says, is clear: the American workforce cannot thrive if it clings to systems that preference shareholders over employees and productivity over morale.

Join New America NYC for a conversation on the past, present, and future of work — and how technology can play a more constructive role in fostering effective systems for both workers and businesses.

Rick Wartzman @RWartzman
Senior Advisor and former Executive Director, Drucker Institute
Author, The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America

Ai-jen Poo @aijenpoo
Executive Director, National Domestic Workers Alliance
Co-director, Caring Across Generations
2014 MacArthur "Genius" Award winner

Jessica Lin @jerseejess
Co-founder and General Partner, Work-Bench

Kristin Sharp @ktsharp2
Executive Director, Shift: The Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology, New America

When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States’ total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged.

According to a new book by Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money, this absence of wealth isn't just a failure to atone for oppression imposed by slavery and Jim Crow — it's the product of contemporary acts to maintain their legacies.

Today, the racial wealth gap persists in building wealth for those who already have it and sowing debt among those who don't. Many policies animated by this trend — fees and fines levied my municipal governments and the criminal justice system; residential segregation; the rise of predatory payday lenders — disappear mainstream banks from communities of color, pass off responsibility of investment in their wealth, and enforce conditions that disproportionately push them from profit to poverty.

Join New America NYC and the NYU McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research for a conversation with legal, business, and racial equity leaders on the fight for economic justice and how to pioneer strategies that reform how government works — and who it serves.

Scott M. Stringer @NYCComptroller
Comptroller, City of New York

Mehrsa Baradaran @MehrsaBaradaran
J. Alton Hosch Associate Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law
Author, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap

Blondel Pinnock @blondel
Senior Vice President and Chief Lending Officer, Carver Federal Savings Bank

Anne Stuhldreher @AnneStuhldreher
Director of Financial Justice, City and County of San Francisco
Fellow, New America CA

Clyde Vanel @clydevanel
Assembly Member (D-33), State of New York

Michael Lindsey @DrMikeLindsey
Director, McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research, New York University

On Sunday, October 8th, join New America NYC for a private screening of Human Flow, a sweeping new film by world-renowned artist, activist, and icon Ai Weiwei, followed by a conversation with Richard Gere and David Miliband on the plight of refugees all over the world.

More than 65 million people have been forcibly displaced due to war, persecution, climate change, and crushing poverty in the greatest human displacement since World War II. Setting out on a journey across 23 countries, Ai Weiwei, who spent his own childhood as a displaced person during China's Cultural Revolution, follows a chain of urgent human stories across the globe to bear witness to this massive human migration, elucidating both the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its intimately personal human impact.

From perilous ocean crossings to barbed-wire borders, Ai follows the desperate attempts of men, women, and children as they move from dislocation and disillusionment to endurance and adaptation. HumanFlow is a testament to the unassailable human spirit and poses a question that will define this century's greatest human rights challenge: will we emerge from fear and isolation and choose a path of freedom and respect for one another?

Ai Weiwei @aiww
Artist and activist
Director, Human Flow

Richard Gere
Actor and humanitarian

David Miliband @DMiliband
President and CEO, International Rescue Committee
Former Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, United Kingdom