TEDxDU Recap

TEDxDU has been an amazing experience.  Many of the people I’ve spoken to said they will be telling people about our first TEDxDU for many years to come.  What a wonderful compliment to all who were involved.

The production team rocked the show- it was FABULOUS!  As with any live show, there were little glitches (we had some mic issues), but that was it.  Not bad.  Not bad at all.

And from the tweets I’ve seen flying around, it seemed that, because of the variety of topics, there really was something of deep value for everyone to take away with them. Among the favorite speakers mentioned, there was:

• Neal Foard, creative ad man from Saatchi & Saatchi New York, who is now referred to in the TEDxDU circle as “the duct tape guy,” because of the logo he created to celebrate the true heroes who are worthy of our reverence above movie stars, sports figures and rock stars- Engineers
• Phil Tedeschi, who spoke on the incredible connection between people and their pets (Phil threw out some incredible statistics like: more children grow up with a pet in the home than a father; and loneliness, which can be as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity, can often be overcome with the love of a pet)
• Photographer and documentarian, Aaron Huey came to us with his raw images and heart breaking story of the Lakota people struggling to survive the aftermath of Wounded Knee 90 years later
• Karambu Ringera, peace pro-activist, working to create and provide a sustainable model of education and enterprise that will empower the people of Kenya to become self-reliant and successful for generations to come
• Our fabulous emcee, Hilary Blair who tied the whole show together with a generous helping of humor and grace was a crowd-pleasing favorite.
• And there were so many other wonderful speakers who really had a lot of interesting things to say along the lines of our theme this year:  Issues.  Ideas.  Action. For the full list of speakers and their bios, please check out the tedxdu website.

I didn’t get to see most of the speakers (as it tends to happen when you’re running around trying to make things work)- but I’ll be excited to see the TEDxDU videos online by the end of this week!

More fun to follow, but I wanted to post some of my favorite shots from the event:

Phil Tedeschi’s dog, Samantha, stole the show!

Karambu Ringera moved the crowd to tears with her talk.

The finale gave me goosebumps with the Spirituals Project Choir, Art Jones, Arthur Bouton’s EWI Collaboration, Regan Linton, the Flobots and the audience all creating beautiful music together.

Photos taken by my good friend Wayne Armstrong.  Excellent shooting, Wayne!