Part I — Red Helicopter® Stories (12:00–3:00 PM)
Red Helicopter ®: A Humanistic Roadmap for Manifesting and Operationalizing Change
A Live Case Study in Building Cultural Infrastructure
March 28 | 12:00–8:00 PM | Tsai CITY | Free and Open to the Public
On March 28, artists, students, civic leaders, and cultural leaders and entrepreneurs from all walks of life will gather at Tsai CITY to immerse in the operating system of Red Helicopter® This will be a day-long public program exploring how personal narrative and values can become the foundations for institutional change.
The event is the culmination of a citywide bookclub where participants are invited to read Yale University’s Cultural Innovation Lab Artist-in-Residence, James Rhee’s global best-selling book, Red Helicopter: A Parable for Our Times©.
Designed as a multi-model and multi-sensory experience, the event will make manifest the future-forward principles underlying the book and demonstrate how humanistic inquiry—story, ethics, interpretation, authorship—can translate directly into operational frameworks, institutional design, and sustainable cultural infrastructure in business and in society.
The event is produced by Red Helicopter® and is hosted by Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale, Neighborhood Music School, New Haven Arts Council, and Tsai CITY.
Part I — Red Helicopter® Stories (12:00–3:00 PM)
New Haven artists and cultural entrepreneurs will share their “Red Helicopter® Stories” — the origin and logic behind what they are building. These presentations move beyond résumé or pitch, identifying the defining moments that shaped each builder’s values, direction, and relationship to ownership. A Red Helicopter® story is a story of agency and purpose.
Discussions after will focus on the balance between agency, mutualism, and goodwill: how individual clarity strengthens collective infrastructure and how personal purpose translates into collective work that is multi-modal, multi-sensory, and systems changing.