Activities
The Commonwealth Club has 16,600 members who sponsor over 400 events each year on topics ranging across politics, culture, society, and the economy. Around 50,000 people attend these events in person annually. It is currently headed by an expert on international security and arms negotiations and former Pentagon official, Gloria Duffy. Club events are broadcast on many public and commercial radio stations in the longest-lasting continuous radio program in the nation.
The club has broadcast its fora since 1924, and current broadcasts are carried weekly by about 230 public and commercial radio stations across the nation. Local residents in the Bay Area can view televised programs from The Club on KGO TV, and video of nearly 500 club programs is carried on the FORA.tv web site. The club also issues podcasts each week that are accessible through iTunes.com and on the club's website and a bi-monthly magazine, The Commonwealth, which is available to club members.
In addition to hosting speeches and panels, the club has initiated several recent public policy projects. These have included Voices of Reform, a nonpartisan effort to bring together California's policy makers and opinion leaders to improve state governance. Voices of Reform became the independent organization California Forward. Similarly, the club's California Media Project merged into California Watch, part of the Center for Investigative Reporting. The club also offers travel programs, with educational trips abroad each year to destinations such as Turkey, Southeast Asia, and Iran.
The Commonwealth Club occasionally comes under criticism from people who think it represents one or another political philosophy, and they often center upon criticism of specific speakers with whom the critics disagree. But the club's more than 400 events a year feature speakers from a wide range of viewpoints—conservative and liberal and moderate and radical, religious and secular, pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian.
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Famous quotes containing the word activities:
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“That is the real pivot of all bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional, procreative body in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions and all the activities of the procreative body were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression. That is the great clue to bourgeois psychology: the reward business.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“...I have never known a “movement” in the theater that did not work direct and serious harm. Indeed, I have sometimes felt that the very people associated with various “uplifting” activities in the theater are people who are astoundingly lacking in idealism.”
—Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932)