See what’s streaming on CHQ Assembly this February! 

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CHQ Assembly’s February 2024 Lineup 

In February, we’re highlighting Chautauqua’s Forum on Democracy.  

Chautauqua’s three-day forum on democracy featured authors, contemporary thinkers and scholars engaging in panel discussions, presentations and seminars. Topics were as varied as history, technology, voting rights, literature, and more. 

Join Chautauqua’s lecturers Trevor Potter, Sayu Bhojwani, David Blight, Michael Waldman, and Christy Vines as they analyze and provide clear, diverse and action-oriented solutions to new paths for our democracy’s future.

If you aren’t a member, visit assembly.chq.org to sign up today! 

Notable Lectures

Trevor Potter

A Republican former Chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Trevor-Potter was general counsel to John McCain’s 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns and an adviser to the drafters of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. To many, he is perhaps best known for his recurring appearances on The Colbert Report as the lawyer for Stephen Colbert’s super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow during the 2012 election, a program that won a Peabody Award for excellence in reporting on money in politics. 

The American Bar Association Journal has described Potter as “hands-down one of the top lawyers in the country on the delicate intersection of politics, law and money.” He is the author of several books and manuals on lobbying regulation and disclosure, campaign finance and federal election law. He has provided testimony and written statements to Congress on federal election proposals, campaign finance regulation and, recently, the effects of the Jan. 6 attack on our democracy. He has also taught campaign finance law at the University of Virginia School of Law and Oxford University and has appeared widely in national broadcast and print media. During the 2020 election season, he was named to the cross-partisan National Task Force on Election Crises. 

Potter received his Juris Doctor from  University of Virginia School of Law and his bachelor’s of arts from arvard University . He is a member of the D.C. Bar and the U.S. Supreme Court Bar. He founded the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) in 2002. 

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Sayu Bhojwani

Born in India and raised in Belize, Sayu Bhojwani is a proud New Yorker who served as the City’s first Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs.  She founded and led South Asian Youth Action (1997), New American Leaders (2010) and Women’s Democracy Lab (2021).  She now combines her real-life and professional experience to share perspectives through No. 1 Immigrant Daughter. For over three decades, she has activated change in nonprofit and government settings, speaking across the country and internationally, and writing on how immigrants and women of color can shape the world we want to see. She is the author of the 2018 book People Like Us and maintains the newsletter No. 1 Immigrant Daughter on Substack. 

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David Blight 

Sterling Professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University David Blight is  a leading expert on the life and writings of Frederick Douglass and on the Civil War. His most recent book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018), won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in history. His book Frederick Douglass’s Civil War (1989), and his editions of Douglass’s Narrative and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk are widely taught in college courses. He also authored American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011). Blight has appeared in several PBS films about African American history and works extensively with museums and other public history projects. His Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 1863–1915 (2001), won a half-dozen prizes, including four from the Organization of American Historians (OAH). 

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Michael Waldman 

Michael Waldman is president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute that works to revitalize the nation’s systems of democracy and justice. He was director of speechwriting for President Bill Clinton from 1995 to 1999 and is the author of The Second Amendment: A Biography and The Fight to Vote. Waldman was a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. A graduate of Columbia College and NYU School of Law, he comments widely in the media on law and policy. 

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Christy Vines 

Christy Vines is the president and CEO of Ideos Institute. She is best known for her unique perspective on faith, society, and culture, and her ability to help people bridge differences and connect more authentically. In 2015, Vines left the field of religious conflict and extremism to focus on the advancement of the burgeoning field of empathic intelligence — -to find answers to the disconnections, biases, and misperceptions that often underlie conflict in the first place. She now leads the organization’s research and its application to the fields of conflict transformation, social cohesion, communal resiliency, and servant leadership. Vines is a published writer, speaker, and the executive producer of the 2022 documentary film, “Dialogue Lab: America,” a moving take on the current state of division and polarization in the U.S. 

Watch all these lectures and more, exclusively on CHQ Assembly.