Every summer, leaders from business, government, science, and the arts travel to a small mountain town in Colorado for the Aspen Ideas Festival. For about a week, Aspen becomes a place where big questions get asked in public, where a CEO and a poet share a panel, and where a conversation on a sidewalk can matter as much as one on stage.
Winter Park can be that kind of place. That is the idea behind the Winter Park Ideas Festival, and this month it took a major step forward.
What the festival will be
The Winter Park Ideas Festival is a multi-day summit planned to debut in 2028. It will bring thinkers, students, young professionals, and neighbors together around one central theme: belonging. The festival will ask how people connect with one another and with the places they call home, and how arts, food, education, wellness, and culture can strengthen a community.
The theme is deliberate. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory naming loneliness and isolation a public health epidemic. Its costs show up in our health, our workplaces, our civic life, and our economy. Winter Park is not immune to those trends, and we want to lead the response.
Winter Park also has what an ideas festival needs. It is a walkable city with a college campus at its center, a strong arts and museum culture, and restaurants, hotels, and gathering places within a few blocks of each other. Picture a keynote in the morning, a smaller conversation over lunch, and an unexpected exchange with a stranger on Park Avenue in the afternoon. A festival like this also brings visitors to local businesses and raises Winter Park’s profile well beyond Central Florida.
The news: the festival joins the Winter Park Institute
On November 6, the Winter Park Institute (WPI) announced that the Winter Park Ideas Festival will become its third signature program line, joining WPI Experiences and Pages for the Ages.
WPI is the right home. Founded at Rollins College in 2007 and now an independent nonprofit, WPI has brought speakers including Maya Angelou, Jane Goodall, Paul McCartney, Ken Burns, and Condoleezza Rice to Central Florida, with more than 50,000 attendees since its first season. It already knows how to bring the world’s most compelling voices to Winter Park and pair big stages with smaller, more personal conversations.
“The most rewarding conversations often happen with someone whose life looks different from our own,” said Lindsay Kist, WPI’s executive director. Lawrence Lyman, chair of the WPI Board of Trustees, called the festival “a natural extension of the Winter Park Institute’s mission.”
From incubation to launch
The festival started at the Winter Park Chamber of Commerce, which incubated it through its affiliated Winter Park Improvement Foundation. The Winter Park Ideas Foundation was formed to develop the concept, and I have been proud to chair that board.
For the past six months, I have worked alongside teams from WPI and the Chamber to bring the festival into WPI. That work was careful and collaborative, and I am grateful to everyone at both organizations who gave it their time. The Chamber gave this idea its start. WPI gives it the reach and resources to grow into something lasting.
The festival was incubated at the Chamber. It will come to life at WPI.
What comes next
WPI will announce programming, timing, and ways to get involved as planning moves forward. Follow along at winterparkinstitute.org and winterparkideas.org. If you have ever come home from a great conversation feeling more connected to the people around you, you already understand what this festival is for.
Sources: Winter Park Institute press release (November 6, 2026); winterparkideas.org; winterparkinstitute.org; U.S. Surgeon General advisory, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” (2023).