Centenary Celebration
Join us as we celebrate Arthur C. Clarke’s Centenary Year! During 2018, the Foundation will honor Sir Arthur as a prescient and imaginative leader for his (and our) times. Moreover, we have launched inter-generational initiatives promoting imagination as a powerful tool for addressing our planet’s greatest challenges.
Throughout the Centenary year and beyond, we will be launching programs in which we will try to answer the questions:
- How can we tap the imagination and views of younger generations who will live with the results of the decisions and actions we do or don’t take today?
- What can we do to help the world’s youth turbocharge the power of their imaginations across multiple skills and perspectives?
- What can we do to inspire adults and institutions to nurture imaginative approaches to challenges both big and small?
- How do we direct this renaissance in imagination toward the challenges of the future?
We are born with rich imaginations. We see it in our children. We remember it in ourselves. And if we’re fortunate to work and live in a supportive environment, we feel free to advance the big ideas, the perhaps seemingly impossible ideas, which can have the power to break through to new levels of accomplishment and problem-solving. Yet not every organization, not every environment welcomes imagination as more than interesting-but-not-applicable to the challenge at hand. In promoting Sir Arthur’s legacy, the Foundation sees imagination as 1) the essential tool to address the complex, consequential and thorny challenges humankind is facing, as 2) the connective tissue between science and the arts, and as 3) central to the future of our planet.
Our young people will inherit the results of what we do now. They are this world’s future. Young people have imagination, but are not yet armed with necessary knowledge and skills. They also hold ground level insights into family and community challenges that can serve as markers of the world’s key challenges and ways forward. The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation wants to provide resources and incentives to young people worldwide to fire their imaginations, strengthened by an understanding of the essential connections among science, technology, and the arts.
We want to draw on the wisdom of different generations through mutual mentoring and lively exchange of views. The objectives of this inter-generational initiative will be to focus fresh thinking and produce substantial, constructive and inspiring proposals for change.
The Foundation’s celebration of Sir Arthurs’s Centenary Year includes:
The 2017 100th birthday celebration on December 9. 2017, which will included the 2017 Clarke Awards, a Centenary Gala, that was preceded by the launch of the first “Clarke Conversation”; a new youth initiative, “Young Leaders: Imagination and Society”; and intergenerational dialogues.
