How do we break through polarization to help global influential leaders solve cutting-edge problems?
We spoke with Erika about what fires her up, and why hyper-intentional design helps us solve our most vexing problems.
Helena believes the most consequential decisions in human history will be made during the next 50 years. Alongside its diverse and accomplished members, Helena identifies projects that aim to solve our pressing societal challenges.
In the spring of 2023, we worked with Helena to bring together global policymakers and private sector leaders to build safe strategies that harness biotech innovation at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center.
First and foremost, Erika Yorio is a passionate New Yorker. In our conversation, she credited the city and her closest friends as constant sources of inspiration and reflected on how new ideas and enriching relationships feed her personally and professionally.
A perfect day for me is, first of all, a summer day. I’d start by biking across the Manhattan Bridge to meet up with friends for galleries or a museum show. I’m super interested in how art both reflects and mediates our collective experience and is also a kind of divining rod for where we’re headed. Some of my most energizing conversations happen in museums but I also love eavesdropping on strangers. (People come to art with opinions, and I am here for them). Afterward, I’d head to the Lower East Side or Chinatown for a meal – someplace that’s a little bit of a scene – which I’d take in on the periphery of some juicy conversational rabbit holes. I’d end the day by heading back to Brooklyn the way I came in; those rides over the bridge really give me a sense of scale and perspective that can be hard to come by in the city.
My work at Helena feeds similar impulses. Through our projects and our membership, Helena provides a unique vantage point – both on the world as it is, and on what’s around the corner. It’s definitely an idea-rich environment and I feel unbelievably privileged to get to expand my frame of reference in collaboration with so many incredible thinkers and practitioners.
I’ve been fortunate to have connected with extraordinary people from the start of my career. Before Helena, I worked with Andrew Zuckerman — a photographer, filmmaker, and creative director. Andrew is a deeply curious person and working with him for seven years felt like a meeting of the minds. He’s also a mover and shaker and a world-class listener so he cultivates a really interesting community. Ultimately, it was Andrew who introduced me to Henry and Sam [the founders of Helena].
The team at Helena brings brilliant minds together to advance their project aims. For their 2023 convening at The Bellagio Center to be fruitful, Erika knew she had to intentionally design an experience that would balance complex participant dynamics and competing perspectives and agendas.
We’ve been building out a programmatic arm at Helena for the past year and a half and it’s underscored how important convening is for deepening relationships and coalition-building. That said, we generally don’t convene for convening’s sake. Instead, we bring people together when we feel there’s a pressing need for stakeholders to work concertedly to advance critical action or carry a project forward.
For our biosecurity project, we worked with global senior leaders from government, think tanks, the private sector, and academia who had very diverse perspectives on the subject matter – much of which focused on the intersection of biotechnology and AI. We knew there would be competing agendas and strongly held beliefs at play. So our goal was to come together, using that diversity and the expertise in the room, to create stronger safeguards around these technologies and drive a coordinated policy advocacy response.
I was incredibly grateful to collaborate with Franklin Street to design our Bellagio convening. You understood the challenges and opportunities from the outset and offered key insights into how to mitigate these and create a forum for productive, tactical engagement. You helped us arrive at an outcome I wasn’t sure was possible when we started.
We partnered with Helena to design an experience that would mitigate the risks brought on by advances in synthetic biology. We prepared the team to navigate complex dynamics and offered structure to guide their design process.
The convening at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center was integral in shaping what participants described as the “bleeding edge” of conversation around emerging biotechnology tools and the shifting biosecurity risk landscape. Helena member Mark Dybul integrated key learnings from those discussions in the Biosecurity in the Age of AI Chairperson’s Statement, which has influenced U.S. executive orders on AI, Senate testimony on AI risks, and reports that informed the UK AI Safety Summit.
One of the first things I learned from Franklin Street was how to engage our target audience before the convening to ensure they had a sense of buy-in in advance — this was no easy feat. We might not have thought to prepare in the same way, but it proved incredibly valuable for the conversations in Bellagio and the advocacy work that followed. Your team helped us navigate complex dynamics and created a container for us to test ideas freely. You quickly adapted to our changing priorities and skillfully crafted an agenda that encouraged productive dialogue among participants. Our collaboration with Franklin Street fundamentally shaped how I think about programmatic design and I continue to draw on it as a blueprint for ongoing convening initiatives at Helena.
What Erika’s Reading
Working Girl: On Selling Sex and Selling Art
So sharp and clear-eyed about the way in which we commodify bodies, art, ideas, and desire, Working GIrl is one part memoir, one part critical theory, and a masterclass in protecting what’s sacred amid the profane.
What Erika’s Watching
Boys State
What happens when you bring a thousand Texan boys together for an unbridled political experiment? This doc pulses with energy, humor, and suspense, while painting an unforgettable portrait of an inspirational hero coming into his own.
Kith is a monthly window into how our team thinks about the art of science of learning at work.