During the past year, CASE has celebrated its 50th anniversary. We’ve had champagne and cupcakes, debates and dialogues, reminiscing and reflections, and balloons and banners. It’s been wonderful.

Birthdays and anniversaries always cause me to take a moment to reflect, which those who know me will find highly unusual since I’m not a particularly reflective kind of guy. When conversations get too intense, I tend to deflect with humor and self-deprecation. (“Brett was deep and reflective” is not a sentence that will appear in my retirement announcement.) But for some reason, birthdays and anniversaries are different—and these past few months marking this milestone in CASE’s history feel especially poignant.