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Whistler learns from Aspen Institute

William Roberts wants to reawaken dialogue in the resort There was once a derelict ghost town nestled at the base of some spectacular snow-capped mountains.

William Roberts wants to reawaken dialogue in the resort

There was once a derelict ghost town nestled at the base of some spectacular snow-capped mountains.

It only took the dream of one wealthy businessman and his sophisticated wife to see that ghost town transformed into a place that nurtured the mind, the body and the spirit - the so-called perfect town.

It was called Aspen.

To that end the Aspen Skiing Company was formed for the body, the Aspen Music Festival for the spirit and the Aspen Institute for the mind.

Borrowing from the brilliant success of the Aspen Institute, a world-renowned organization dedicated to informed dialogue and inquiry on global issues, Whistler has begun to mimic the basic principles of the Institute, offering a place where people can expand the horizons of their mind.

It's called the Whistler Forum.

"As we develop the Whistler Forum, we want it to be rooted in local issues with local people and local concerns, at the same time as blending that with concern for... and knowledge about, what's going on at the global level," said William Roberts, who has spearheaded this initiative.

"In some ways I see the difference from Aspen is that they started more globally and then worked it down to how it would fit into the community and we sort of want to go the other direction."

Amy Margerum, executive vice president, administration and finance of the Aspen Institute, was in Whistler last week to share the story of the non-profit organization and offer advise for the Whistler initiative.

More than 50 years ago Chicago businessman Walter Paepcke and his wife Elizabeth saw the potential deep in the Colorado mountains in a place once called the Salzburg of the Rockies.

"This was right after the war and they felt that people had lost touch with the community and what was important globally... and in particular they felt that businessmen, corporate leaders in the United States, needed to play a much larger role in societal concerns," she said.

World leaders, poets and musicians all congregated to talk about what's going on in the world amid the backdrop of the Rocky Mountains.

"People felt like this was so powerful that they wanted to continue it and that was really the birth of the Aspen Institute," she added.

Now it operates on a $40 million (US) budget and roughly 5,000 people take part in the programs every year. The Aspen Institute, and some of its spin-off non-profit organizations, is one of the key reasons Aspen is so busy in the summer season, pumping up the resort economy.

"In fact the summers in Aspen are as big if not bigger than the winters in Aspen," said Margerum.

The Institute attracts Nobel Prize winners, Supreme Court Justices, former presidents and others of their ilk, to meet and talk, learn and dissect and listen in a safe environment.

"It's very difficult, especially for a lot of high level people, to say what they think in any environment," said Margerum.

"This gives people an opportunity to brainstorm, which you don't get very often when people are taking what you say literally."

One of their flagship programs is the executive seminar. Roberts attended this weeklong course last August, along with members of the Central Intelligence Agency, people in the high tech industry in Silicon Valley and an American Ambassador to the Middle East.

"This was really new for me because it was a seminar that really didn't have specific problems that we were solving but it was looking in an underlying way at really what our own basic values and assumptions are about a variety of factors," said Roberts.

The program is designed to get the participants to understand the basic values that are at the heart of complex decisions.

They do this through readings of the great thinkers, past and present. Margerum said the timeless values explored by Plato and Aristotle and Martin Luther King Jr. do not change.

It's an exercise that really engages the brain again and gets people to think she said, something that more and more people are looking for in today's society.

"People are clamouring for this in their life," she said.

On a much smaller scale, the Whistler Forum has started to do the same thing through its Dialogue Cafés.

There have been a series of cafés to date that have touched on discussions from international peace and security and same sex marriage to topics of more local relevance like wearing helmets on the mountains.

Roberts said there's a core group of about 20 people who come to many cafés but more than 200 in total have been to at least one over the past six months.

"The primary goal at this point is that the Forum would provide a safe and stimulating place for people of differing points of view and experiences to come together and share their own experience and listen and learn from the experiences of others," said Roberts.

"I think we wanted the Whistler Forum to move in a number of directions but we want to root it and anchor it in the community of people and residents here in Whistler. So as we move forward and make plans and roll out various programs and initiatives, we want to make sure it resonates with and is open to and participated by people who actually live here to increase the quality of life and the range of opportunities for local residents."

For the Whistler Forum to flourish like the Aspen Institute Margerum suggests it may need to think bigger in the years to come.

"You need the reputation, the brand, for people to have faith in the organization," she said.

"The Aspen Institute's lucky, we've been around for 50 years.

"The Institute has always had that cachet with it because the people who were involved in it were interesting and important people."

While there may be things that the Whistler Forum can borrow from the Aspen Institute, Roberts said the Forum's board is continuing to set its own priorities and plans for the time being.

"It's too early yet to say exactly which path and how far we'll go down with them (the Aspen Institute) together as an official partnership," said Roberts.

In the meantime the Aspen Institute is doing a large conference this summer that will focus on the life and work of Albert Einstein. It will not only look at his science but his morality, how he thought about God, and today's nuclear policy. It will also look at how Einstein's theory of relativity changed the way people looked at music and art.

The next Dialogue Café, in March, will be a discussion about the role of citizens and patients in terms of the Canadian health care system, with the head of the B.C. Medical Association.

Everyone is welcome to listen and add his or her two cents.