About the Forum

Cambridge Forum’s purpose is to inform, explore, entertain and challenge preconceptions on a wide range of current and timeless subjects. Forums are recorded live with audience participation, and freely distributed to the world through NPR, GBH Forum Network, and CF podcasts. The outcome is a community better informed to understand and appreciate what affects life and the planet.

Directions to live public forums in Harvard Square (currently suspended):

Cambridge Forum events are free and open to the public.

Our programs aim to freely

  • Open up minds to new ideas, developments, experiences, and opportunities for further exploration.
  • Educate individuals so that they can make more informed decisions about the salient issues that affect their lives and indeed, all life on the planet.
  • Promote discussions from presentations of guest speakers, who invite the live audience members to participate and engage with their own opinions, questions and concerns.
  • Present a progressive viewpoint in its choice of topics that widely reflect current and future societal concerns; taking its input from a wealth of speakers including authors, innovators, activists, powerbrokers and policymakers.
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Mary Stack brings a wealth of experience in TV, journalism and education to her role as director of Cambridge Forum.  Stack earned a degree in Journalism and an M.A. in Mass Communications from the University of Leicester.  She has taught creative writing and journalism in private schools around Boston.  Ms. Stack’s professional background is in the media mainly as a TV documentary producer and journalist. 

Cambridge Forum was originally founded by Rev. Herbert Vetter in 1967 as a program of the First Parish (Unitarian Universalist) in Cambridge to provide a safe platform from which to examine salient social issues. The Civil Rights Movement and the war in Vietnam were among the most urgent topics initially discussed. From the beginning it brought expert scholars, writers, policymakers, and thinkers face to face with a public audience in a lively and engaged dialogue.

Prof. Matthew Meselson and Rev.Herbert Vetter at a Cambridge Forum on the controversial topic “Should we halt recombinant DNA research?

Over its 50+ year history, Cambridge Forum has presented hundreds of public programs  in Harvard Square featuring such speakers as Buckminster Fuller, John Kenneth Galbraith, Marian Wright Edelman, Stephen Jay Gould, Jonathan Kozol, Lani Guinier, Paul Krugman, James Carroll, Rabbi Harold Kushner and hundreds more in respectful and meaningful discussions of potentially divisive contemporary issues. Its programs are free in every sense of the word; they are open to the public without an admission charge and based on the principles of free inquiry and freedom of speech. After laying out the topic for discussion in a brief exposition, speakers respond to the comments, questions and concerns of the public audience. With its emphasis on dialogue, Cambridge Forum fulfills its mission of fostering civic engagement and participatory democracy and exemplifies its underlying principle that an informed citizenry will make wise decisions promoting a just society.

Cambridge Forum broadcasts a weekly radio show via NPR, posts podcasts to the CF website and GBH Forum Network uploads our programs to YouTube, and thus brings program recordings to an aggregated on-line audience of 350,000 in the U.S and around the world.  In 1999, Cambridge Forum was incorporated as a non-profit 501(c)(3) to better maintain its mission, financially. It remains deeply committed to its civic engagement, and to fostering the principle that an informed public make wiser and more just decisions. In this way, Cambridge Forum hopes to contribute to the vision of democracy as a viable, enduring entity.

Let us change your mind!