The headline on a recent Time Moneyland article—“Can Entrepreneurs, Stuck on an Island for a Few Days, Solve the World’s Biggest Problems?”—might lead you to conclude it’s about a new reality-TV competition. But no, the story cov- ered the inaugural Nantucket Project, a conference that delib- erately cast the small Massachusetts island, 30 miles south of Cape Cod, in a starring role. Produced in partnership with the Big Think—an online
forum exploring “the big ideas and core skills defining the 21st century”—TheNantucket Project was spearheaded by two individuals with deep ties to the community. The confer- ence’s chairman, Tom Scott, founded Nantucket Nectars, while its executive director, Kate Brosnan, is a 30-year resident and general manager of Plum TVNantucket. The two were instrumental in handpicking the 300-plus participants and 25 top-name presenters who gathered over a late-September/ early-October weekend atNantucket’s White Elephant Resort. Brosnan, who spoke to Convene a few weeks before the
conference launched, said The Nantucket Project was inspired by a literary event called Bookmark that was held on the island five years before. Scott and Brosnan had worked together in partnership with The Atlantic magazine to bring “great writers here under a tent on the island’s Jetties Beach,”
Brosnan said. “And we had a really wonderful conversation —so that kind of put the seed into our mind about the poten- tial for doing events like that.” Following Bookmark, members of the Urban Land Insti-
tute visited Nantucket at the invitation of ReMain, a local organization dedicated to strengthening the island’s down- town during the economic downturn. As she was participat- ing in that discussion, Brosnan said, she had a thought: Why aren’t we using Nantucket as a campus? “Nantucket has been a place for visionaries for a very long
time,” she said. “Imean Frederick Douglass [spoke before abolitionists gathered in Nantucket] and [astronomer] Maria Mitchell [was born there]—and there are a lot of great people that come though our island and who live here year-round.” Brosnan also thought that it would be good to host an
event at “a different time of year when our economy could use a boost—when all the traffic is gone, the people are gone, and the island is definitely at its best,” she said. Bros- nan got together a “founding circle” of residents “who really believe in Nantucket,” and they started the process of planning the conference.