By Chuck Cascio, Author and Former South Lakes Teacher
Anne Aaron, a 1984 graduate of South Lakes High School, remembers the Turf Lane neighborhood in Hunters Woods where she lived for part of her childhood as a "a woodsy after-school playground" where "if someone needed an extra for kickball or soccer, they'd just go knock on doors." Living in that social environment seems to have had an impact on Anne’s incredible career.
At Duke University, Anne faced a conundrum in selecting her major: "Political science? English? Sociology? Then I discovered that a public policy major required coursework in a minimum of four disciplines – political science, economics, statistics, and ethics. A little bit of everything! Perfect for someone who didn't want to commit."
Upon graduating from Duke, Anne moved to Boston where, after "a brief stint writing speeches for a former Boston mayor,” she accepted a position as head of student programs at Harvard University's Institute of Politics (IOP), which seeks to inspire students to embrace professions in politics and public service. Anne says she quickly learned, "There's no real handbook for students graduating from college who want to make an impact in the public realm. The IOP provides opportunities for them to meet practitioners outside the classroom and to build skills they can take into the real world as public servants."
At the IOP, Anne helped create "a team of student-researchers who learned how to design, implement, and interpret a survey instrument. The experiment was a success and students at the IOP still conduct the Harvard Youth Poll twice annually. It has become the country's most comprehensive look at young Americans’ political opinions and voting trends."
Anne's commitment to programs that make a meaningful public impact continued to grow. Since 2003, she has worked for the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, which sponsors programs that, she says, have three major objectives: "to help people understand the major challenges facing democracy today; to inspire cur- rent and future generations to political participation and public service; and to promote debate and discussion of issues at the heart of contemporary democra- cy that relate to the legacy of President Kennedy."
The latest outgrowth of her work at the Kennedy Foundation is a new program called the Earthshot Innovation Challenge: Northeast U.S. Edition. It is an outgrowth of the foundation's partner- ship with the Earthshot Prize, founded by Prince William in 2020 and inspired by JFK's 1962 Moonshot speech. "It is an ambitious global environmental prize that aims to discover and help scale the world’s most innovative climate and environmental solutions to protect and restore planet Earth," Anne says.
This program seeks to ignite Northeastern based innovations that will make meaningful positive change in the areas of air quality, ocean health, conservation, sustainability, and climate change. “We've fielded applications from a breathtaking array of bold, creative initiatives and technologies that hold promise, and we'll be honoring the winners of this challenge in September on the anniversary of the Moonshot speech,” Anne says.
No doubt, those initiatives will, in part, help preserve Reston's “woodsy” Turf Lane playground she fondly remembers.
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