Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/1078587
172 BAL HARBOUR "What we're striving to create is a platform where you have the best, the brightest and the most innovative from all verticals gathered in one space." —Alex Zhang COMMUNITY BUILDING CAN START TO FEEL like a hollow term for networking. Tumblr published guidelines for it. Start-up incubators pride themselves on it. A kind of socializing for the anti-social, our new ways of building one, however loosely, provide little structure for making them a tangible reality. Summit, however, seems to understand that locality, even for a short while, is essential to weaving together some earnest threads of connection. The annual kaleidoscopic, Los Angeles-based well, summit, brings together a curated program of people who appear to have little in common with each other except that they've all made it to the level of global expert, leader—or even star. "We want people to connect better," Alex Zhang, the organization's Art Director, says over breakfast at Silver Lake's perpetually buzzing Café Stella. "Human connection and empathy go a long way. In all six pillars of Summit's program—Talks, Performances, Wellness, Culinary, Arts, and Impact—human connection is in the middle. We can connect over a great meal or a yoga class, and it's the most successful when it's multidisciplinary and multigenerational and multidimensional. What we're striving to create is a platform where you have the best, the brightest, and the most innovative from all verticals gathered in one space. Right now, that doesn't exist; most industries are quite siloed if you think about it." Summit grew from the same place that many straightforward solutions to the world's complex circumstances do—with friends talking late into the night. Ryan Begelman, Summit's CEO, describes the organization's beginnings as something unforeseen. "When we started, we had barely been to an event, let alone a talk. We were in our early to mid-20s, working nonstop to start our careers. The idea of a talk never came up until days before the second Summit, in Riviera Maya, Mexico in 2009. We just thought, 'what if Scott Harrison, founder of Charity Water, shared his story and a bit about his mission to drill wells across Africa?' The day of his talk, we scrambled together