Kia ora there,

As 2025 winds down, we’d like to thank everyone who has taken part in Aspen NZ’s work this year - our participants, partners, supporters, directors, and the wider Aspen community.

In a year of accelerating pace and sharper trade-offs, your engagement helped create rare space for careful thinking and constructive dialogue across differences — on issues that matter, from national security to trust in the news. This Summer Review reflects on the people and programmes that shaped the past six months, and the conversations that carry into 2026.

Wishing you a safe and restful summer, and every good wish for the year ahead. Thank you!

Christine and the Aspen NZ team

Aspen NZ Socrates Seminar Dec 2025

Katie Milne (Chair), Jo Coughlan (Director) and founders Sir Don McKinnon and Christine Maiden Sharp

In September, we farewelled Sir Don McKinnon from his role as founding Trustee and Director, with immense gratitude for his long-standing leadership and pivotal contribution to Aspen NZ’s creation, growth and standing. We are pleased that Sir Don continues his association with the Institute as Co-Patron, maintaining a valued connection to our work.

We also welcomed Simon Bridges as a new Trustee and Director. Simon brings experience across governance, public policy, and complex decision environments, strengthening the Board as Aspen NZ continues to navigate a rapidly changing global and domestic context.

Within the wider Aspen network, Dan Porterfield has announced he will complete his tenure as President and CEO of the Aspen Institute (US) in the northern summer of 2026. Dan’s leadership has been central in expanding the Institute’s global reach and reinforcing its role as a trusted convener of values-based dialogue. His legacy will continue to shape the international network of which Aspen NZ is proud to be part.

Global Affairs

This year, Aspen NZ continued to provide opportunities for New Zealanders to engage directly with global perspectives and pressing international questions.

In partnership with the University of Otago, we delivered the inaugural Aspen Otago National Security Forum in Queenstown. Bringing together senior leaders, academics, and practitioners, the forum explored shared security challenges facing New Zealand and Australia, from geopolitical competition to youth radicalisation. The depth of discussion reflected both the urgency of the topic and the value of creating space for informed, cross-sector exchange. Next year, Aspen NZ will build on this work, with a focus on the need for a whole-of-society approach to national security.

Connected Communities

Internationally, Aspen NZ supported participation in the Global Changemakers Workshop in Bogotá, Colombia, where New Zealand scholarship recipient Archie Ritchie joined emerging leaders from around the Institute, to discuss the timely topic of migration. The programme offered exposure to diverse approaches to leadership, governance, and social change, reinforcing the importance of global connection and collaboration in addressing complex, shared challenges.

Critical Conversations

In early December, the Socrates Seminar returned to Queenstown, continuing Aspen’s tradition of moderated dialogue grounded in trust, analysis, and diverse perspectives.

The 2025 programme bought leaders and thinkers together around a well timed and challenging question: Will We Ever Trust the News Again? The seminar created space for sustained reflection beyond the constraints of public debate or sound-bite commentary. As always, the value of Socrates lay not in definitive answers, but in the quality of the questions explored, and in the relationships built through thoughtful, open dialogue, and all the moments in-between. 

You can read a collection of reflections from our scholarship recipients on our news page.

Early in the new year, Aspen NZ will launch Debugging Decision Making, designed to support leaders navigating uncertainty, complexity, and competing priorities.

A fast paced, one day roundtable that introduces a practical framework for testing assumptions, broadening options, and avoiding common decision traps, drawing on both evidence and values to strengthen judgement and outcomes.

The programme reflects a growing demand for decision making capability that is both rigorous and human, particularly in high-pressure environments.

We look forward to welcoming participants on February 24th and to continuing this work into 2026. Register here.

New Zealand is confronting a set of economic, social and security challenges that are becoming more complex - and more consequential - by the year. How leaders think, decide and engage with one another now will shape our country’s future.

Aspen NZ exists to support that work at a critical moment. As the only Aspen Institute partner in the Southern Hemisphere, we connect New Zealand to a global network and a proven, non-partisan method for rigorous dialogue - creating rare space for leaders to grapple seriously with difficult choices.

Te Kākano, our supporters programme, makes this possible. Through business and individual support, the programme backs work that strengthens leadership capability, reinforces civil society, and keeps New Zealand connected to global ideas and debates when it matters most.

If you are interested in supporting Aspen NZ, either as an organisation or an individual, we encourage you to contact us in early 2026 as we advance this urgent work - or make a contribution today.