The Fresno Future Project held its second annual conference, a two-day event, at the Fresno Art Museum on Friday and Saturday.

The conference — organized and moderated by A. Sameh El Kharbawy, a Fresno State art and design professor — was centered on the discussion of Fresno’s economic, cultural and social future.

The event featured more than 10 speakers — instructors, local officials and community leaders — who engaged in various topics of lecture and panel discussions. The topics included Fresno’s economy, communities, culture and arts scene and more.

“Fresno Future is a gathering of minds,” Kharbawy said.

“What we do is we get a few smart people and talk about how we can make the city better… That’s what Fresno Future is. It’s really a way to promote that kind of dialogue between experts, businesses, the community and people in order to solve some of the problems in Fresno.”

Kharbawy founded the project in 2011.

Attendance and interest has increased considerably since the project’s inaugural conference last year, Kharbawy said.

“We had a much bigger turnout that we had to break (the conference) into two days,” Kharbawy said. “The crowd got younger. It was a nice mix of things and we’re getting the attention of the people that I closely care much about: my students.”

One of the topics discussed through panelists and audience participation on the second day was the city’s revitalization efforts in downtown Fresno and the Fulton Mall. Various audience members participated in the discussion and shared their thoughts.

Geoffrey Becker, a senior construction management major graduating this semester, said it was among one of the more engaging topics discussed among conference panelists and audience members.

“It’s eye-opening to see everyone’s different ideas about Fresno,” Becker said. “It’s interesting to think about things in a new way and it really gets you fired up. It increases your level of pride in the community.”

“We can’t make (downtown Fresno) a destination. We need to make it a community, which means adding the residential elements to it so that they’re the ones using the area the most, because we can’t count on people coming from north Fresno just because it’s another place to shop.”

One of the concepts that fell with the project’s theme of “Global, Sustainable, Diverse” was the idea of a “Boomerang Project,” ensuring and enticing Fresno graduates and products to come back to Fresno to maintain sustainability in the economy, Kharbawy said.

“Most of my students want to graduate, and the day they graduate they want the first train ticket to get out of Fresno,” Kharbawy said. “They want to go to San Francisco or Los Angeles… they want to have the culture and the museums and the entertainment — all of that. And that’s understandable.

“(Fresno Future) is really a function of persuading people that you can have all of this here in Fresno.”

Becker, who was one of four Fresno State student speakers present at the conference, is researching graduate school options in sustainability management.

Pursuing a graduate degree will likely steer him away from Fresno, he said.

“I definitely feel that in my field I would be able to work and live very comfortably here,” Becker said.

“I will have to be one of the boomerangs because I will have to go elsewhere to further my education.”