The Helena Meetings

A deeply simple insight lies at the center of Helena’s model. Getting things done in the world at scale requires coordinating the right groups of people to be in the right place at the right time.

The Helena Meetings have been how we’ve done that. For more than a decade, selecting the key people within Helena’s network that need to work together and convening them to take action has been what sets us apart.

The Meetings are carefully designed, consistent gatherings where the process of envisioning new Helena Projects and pushing our existing efforts to the next level happens. Starting from a Skype call in a college dorm room, we’ve scaled The Helena Meetings to a global footprint. But what has remained dogma throughout has been preserving their minimalism.

Tangible, operational outcomes resulting from The Meetings are all that matters, so we focus on stripping away anything that distracts from the actual work. We prioritize locations that challenge and inspire participants to think at greater scale and from first principles. We create an environment of debate from a basis of mutual respect, in which it is everyone’s responsibility to update their position when new data renders it incomplete. And from the beginning, The Meetings have shunned traditional programming structure. Working groups over speeches, community over commerciality.

Helena’s singular mission is to enact solutions to critical global problems. The Meetings take different forms to best match the unpredictable demands that mission generates. Some are larger summits, spanning multiple topics and disciplines to bring together each corner of the larger Helena community. Some are the inverse: targeted gatherings to debate or advance a specific solution in a narrow domain. Some begin as simple and informal discussions, especially when timeliness of the conversation is more important than elaborate production. Other Meetings are best had after thoughtful preparatory and analytical work.

As we look back at the first decade of Helena and forward toward the next, we are constantly reminded that human trust, friendship and respect are the essential ingredients to an organization built to last. We’re grateful for our incredible team, Helena community and partners who continue to make The Helena Meetings where the magic happens.