About the opportunity
What this programme is offering
Most conversations about the future of this country don’t include the people who will actually live it. Aspen Ideas: Rising Generations exists to change that by bringing together 350 of the most curious, most committed young people in America, ages 18-24, to work together on the ideas and issues that actually matter.
21 years
For more than 20 years, the Aspen Ideas Festival has convened the thinkers, builders, and cultural leaders shaping our future. For the first time, that room fully belongs to young adults.
350
Participants selected from across the country - all backgrounds, all experiences, every type of journey to get here.
4 days
Four days of big ideas, engaging conversations, immersive experiences, and interactive activations designed to start dialogue worth having.
$0
Fully funded attendance for accepted participants including travel, lodging, meals, and all programming.
Big ideas come to life when curious and committed people with different views are in the same room. This is that room.
What you’ll explore:
Four tracks. The issues that matter to young people.
For the first time, young people set the agenda. Sessions are built for cross-difference learning, where you don’t just attend the conversation, you lead it.
Code + Conscious
For young people who are already living inside the technology they're inheriting – the algorithms, the platforms, the AI threading through daily life – and who have strong opinions about what it should actually do for people. This track is for those ready to think across differences, hear from people who see technology completely differently, and walk away with a wider view of what becomes possible.
Earn + Build
For young people who are already building — businesses, careers, community, something that lasts — and who want to think bigger about the systems shaping economic life: housing, education, wages, wealth. The most original economic thinking oftentimes comes from people whose realities look nothing alike. This track creates the conditions for exactly that kind of exchange.
Make + Move
For young people who understand that culture — the music, the art, the humor, the language, the ways a generation expresses and understands itself — is not a soft subject. Joy is not the opposite of seriousness. It's the fuel for it. And the most lasting creative work tends to come from genuine exchange across differences, not from a single point of view.
Spirit + Purpose
For young people across the full spectrum of faith and belief — religious and non-religious, traditional and questioning, certain and searching — who take seriously the inner life of a generation that is too often reduced to its politics. This track creates space to sit with perspectives far from your own, and to find what holds even when nothing lines up neatly
How to apply