“Take your ideas out of the filing cabinet,” read a PowerPoint slide during Kai Stinchcombe’s opening presentation at the Roosevelt Institution’s inaugural event at Tresidder’s Oak Lounge last night.

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Jon Casto

President Hennessy and other staff members, faculty and students brainstormed ways to increase faculty diversity yesterday.

About 400 students and Stanford community members attended the event, titled “A Rendezvous with Destiny,” which marked the launch of the Institution, the nation’s first student-run think tank.

Stinchcombe, the Roosevelt Institution’s president and a graduate student in political science, said the organization’s mission is to tap “underutilized intellectual capital.”

“We have a lot to offer our country as Stanford students,” he said. “We write theses, collaborate on faculty projects, form student groups and research issues we care about, but when we just turn a paper in to a professor and forget about it, we waste a tremendous amount of intellectual capital.”

Executive Director Quinn Wilhelmi, a sophomore, explained the Institution’s goals to the standing room-only crowd.

“By establishing Roosevelt, we are preparing young leaders for the real world and re-politicizing a generation that has been turned off to the political process,” he said. “This is as much about process as it is about product.”

Student fellows from five of Roosevelt’s 12 issue-focused centers presented policy briefs from their respective centers. Topics included improving domestic environmental policy, the rising AIDS epidemic among married women in South Africa and reforming elementary school education for Liberian refugees in San Francisco.

Freshman Margot Isman, a Roosevelt Institution fellow, announced that a number of other universities have chapters of the organization in the works, including Columbia and Cornell. A chapter is already at Yale; its officers made a video that was presented at the event.

Following the program, attendants were encouraged to network with Roosevelt Institution fellows and officers while a jazz band played.

Sophomore Jackie Bernstein said she was impressed by the event.

“It was very professional and very effective,” she said. “I was really surprised by the turn-out — I thought it would be 12 kids in a darkroom, but it was so crowded I could barely squeeze my way in the door.”

A similar outreach event will probably take place by the end of the quarter, and Roosevelt Institution officers said they were encouraged by the reception.

“Over 200 students signed up to learn more about Roosevelt [Institution] and to potentially take part in its future,” said Public Relations Director Vilas Rao, a sophomore.

“Looking at how well the event went, it’s clear that our team is competent and dedicated enough to take over a country; let’s make it our own,” Stinchcombe said.