Three recent ConVal High School graduates will share what it’s like to be an adolescent today. 

How does social media influence their lives?  How might they respond to politics? What does it feel like never to be fully disengaged from the feed of information? Young people today are often spoken for and sometimes unheard. The ConVal graduates will talk about how they see their world, its options and challenges. 

Village Harmony, a Vermont non-profit, promotes the study and performance of ethnic singing traditions from around the world.  For more than 30 years it has organized teen ensembles each summer in New England. In foreign countries it has organized ensembles for mixed-age and adult singers.  Each ensemble develops its own unique sound with a different team of leaders.

Tom Weiner, a writer and educator, and Dr. Amilcar Shabazz, professor of Afro-American Studies, will describe how the experiences of abolitionists who lived centuries ago remain relevant today. They are co-authors of a recent book “Defiance: 20 Abolitionists You Were Never Taught in School” (Oliver Branch Press, 2025). 

Laura Knoy founded and hosted “The Exchange,” the Granite State’s most recognized and respected news talk show on New Hampshire Public Radio. Listeners loved it, and Knoy enjoyed it. 

Then, after 25 years, she walked away in 2018.

Alex Green, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, will describe how the early 20th century’s leading figure on intellectual and developmental disabilities, Dr. Walter E. Fernald, discovered that he had made a series of fundamental, terrible mistakes that were harming the very people he had sought to serve. Dr. Fernald spent the rest of his life advocating for new and better approaches.  

People often feel powerless to create social change. Issues like misinformation, climate change, and the erosion of democracy are “wicked” problems. They are complex, multifaceted, global challenges with no simple solutions. How can anyone make a difference when it comes to problems like these? 

Michael Brownstein, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at John Jay College in New York City, will draw from philosophy, history, and social science to offer tools for thinking in new ways about how everyone can make a difference, but not in the ways we usually think.  

Robert (Bob) Beck has spent his adult life immersed in the complexities of international relations. From 1982, when he first lived overseas in Germany in the U.S. military, until 2020 when he and his wife Meg retired to Peterborough, his career spanned more than  than 30 years abroad in the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

In her talk, based on her recent book “Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World,” legal scholar Sara Bronin will discuss the little known levers that control our world: zoning codes. Bronin argues that once we recognize the power of zoning, we can harness it to create the communities we desire and deserve.