Karl Hofmann, president and CEO of Population Services International, will give the morning lecture at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater.
There, he will discuss his work in PSI, as well as his background in diplomacy and public service — and how population trends can be looked at through a broader, overarching lens.
Hofmann served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Togo and deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. He’s also served as executive secretary of the U.S. State Department, and as a member of President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council staff.
He plans to bring his perspective, informed by his work at PSI and his background in diplomacy and public service, to the Amp stage where he will give a lecture about “ways in which (Chautauquans’) own tax dollars try and influence those trajectories (of changing demographics and population numbers) and what that looks like at a very practical, on-the-ground level, and ways that they might think about the challenges and opportunity of demography differently than they have before,” he said.
PSI is a 54-year-old organization working to address many aspects of public health, including HIV, malaria, water and sanitation, and non-communicable diseases, according to Hofmann.
He said that the “emotional core” and the original part of PSI’s work is focused on reproductive health, family planning and contraception.
He sees his work at PSI and his work as a diplomat as being very similar.
“When you’re a diplomat, you go overseas to try to advance and promote the values of your country and you do that by having to influence people and partner with people,” he said.
His work at PSI is about “helping people to make healthy choice for themselves and for their communities. It’s about taking a workforce that’s very centered in the Global South and the places where we work and motivating them and training and steering them to achieve a complex objective. That feels very similar to the work that I did as a diplomat, so in that sense, it’s a familiar operating environment.”
Hofmann said that when the organization was founded, there were a little over 4 billion people populating the earth; now there are over 8 billion.
“There’s a story there about the work that we do that I think is very vibrant for the topic,” Hofmann said. “It’s time to meet the needs of people who want to space and limit their fertility, but you have to look at it in a much broader lens. … How does that connect to broader trends in health, how does that connect to broader trends in wealth, how does that connect to issues of social and economic development, how does that connect to politics, and how does that connect to the foundational truth that our kids and grandkids are going to inherit? Because these are big, planet-moving trends, and it’s important to understand them and also understand how you can shape them.”
While these trends can seem overwhelming and immutable, Hofmann said that there are ways that they can be influenced every day, and he hopes Chautauquans will come to the lecture with an open mind about how these trends can be influenced.
“The actions we take here — particularly when you talk about demography — can have vast effect in decades ahead, and the takeaway is about agency,” he said. “It’s agency on the part of people sitting at Chautauqua and it’s about agency on the part of women in the most remote parts of the Global South controlling their fertility more than they have for centuries, or for eons, or forever, and those two aspects of agency are what’s going to make our world pleasant and thriving or not in the next era.”
