Connecting threads and common themes

Iowa Ideas is ambitious in scope. Not only is it comprised of multiple events, magazines, digital media, and more, it is dedicated to exploring seven key topic areas in depth:

- K-12 education

- Higher education

- Health care

- Workforce & regionalism

- Agriculture

- Energy & environment

- Transportation

While this is, frankly, intimidating for a first time event, we are committed to a cross-disciplinary approach. Creativity – and creative solutions to wicked problems – comes from looking outside of our usual industries. 

Our conversations to date have borne this out: The people who care about workforce and regionalism are eager to connect with the people who care about education and the people who care about transportation. The environmentalists have a desire to work with the farmers, and vice versa. As we wrote before, we believe that one of our greatest strengths as Iowans is that we are willing to hear each other out, even when we disagree.

Yet even with these seven topics, we knew there were more issues we hadn't declared. Big, elephant-in-the-room issues and also big opportunities to connect and move ideas forward. So we created a group of topics that we've been calling 'threads.' Rather than being segmented into their own tracks, each of these connecting threads will be explored in each of the seven tracks. The threads include:

- Iowa's changing demographics: Including aging, the urban/rural divide and diverse sources of population growth for Iowa's cities and towns.

- Welcoming diversity and inclusion: Beyond acknowledging changing demographics, how can we actively welcome people with new perspectives and different experiences to our state?

- Technology: Our friends at the Technology Association of Iowa are fond of saying 'every company is a tech company now.' We agree, and the impacts of technology are only going to keep changing each of our identified industries.

- Culture: The elements that inspire us, open our hearts and connect us to others. What cultural landscape do we want in Iowa? More pressingly, how can we make sure everyone visiting Cedar Rapids for the Iowa Ideas conference this fall has a memorable experience? (Reach out if you want to get involved on this front.)

So, for example, instead of creating a separate diversity track, we are committed to exploring diversity in each of the seven industry-based tracks. Though, people are free to move between tracks, and we will try to lay out the schedule so if you wanted to attend multiple diversity sessions, you could. Ditto for technology, demographics and culture.

Our hope is that by mixing and matching these topics, attendees will be exposed to a variety of fresh ideas and are able to attend the sessions that most interest them.

We'll need many perspectives, from many industries, and many parts of Iowa (and beyond!) to pull this off, and we hope you'll join us. You can learn more about getting involved here. And we'd love to hear feedback on these topics and any others – drop us a line any time at iowaideas@thegazette.com.