From Humiliation to Gratitude an Unlikely Journey
In this 2021 TEDxSeattleWomen talk, Brook West discusses how loss, grief, and the desire to ignore pain are human traits but ultimately surrendering to the experience clears a path to happiness.
Eulogies for the living: how to move through grief
Imagine hearing your eulogy—while you’re still able to savor it. In this funny, touching 2021 TEDxSeattleWomen talk, Andrea Driessen shares a story about what she calls Gracenotes, or living eulogies. And how to write such a note to lessen grief and regret. Through humor and poignancy, Andrea challenges us to honor others by telling them that they #matter—and HOW they matter—while we’re all still alive. Andrea is a longtime hospice volunteer with Providence Hospice of Seattle. Through her interactions with people who are dying—and their loved ones—she’s developed this compelling, how-to practice for easing grief and boosting peace. She’s also a learning, training, and development expert who helps people and organizations worldwide become more capable, communicative, and connected. An internationally award-winning business owner who built her business from the ground up, she’s dedicated her career to helping others grow. Her 3x award-winning book, The Non-Obvious Guide to Event Planning: For Kick-Ass Gatherings that Inspire People, is in its second printing.
Learn more about Eulogies for the Living at https://www.grace-notes.org/.
Your journey to true allyship
In this 2021 TEDxSeattleWomen talk, Talisa Lavarry explains how true allyship is opening doors for the marginalized that they cannot open for themselves. She outlines three key tactics for us to employ on our journey to allyship and gives examples for how these play out in real life.
Talisa leaves us with an appeal to use her advice to create a personalized allyship plan and journey, and reminds us that the things many of us take for granted may be the very thing that changes, or even saves, the life of someone who is marginalized.
The life giving power of voting local
In his 2021 TEDxSeattle talk, Brian Hastert demonstrates how participating in local democracy is the best way to tackle issues we may think of as national or even global. He asks, “How can we have a just country if we have unjust states, unjust cities?”
Brian explains why every vote matters, highlights locally elected officials across the country who are breaking barriers and working to increase equity and access in their cities and states, and he challenges us to do one simple thing: support local democracy.
The Transforming Power of Authentic Community
In this 2021 TEDxSeattle talk, K. Killian Noe discusses the power of authentic community, which she defines as being deeply known and deeply loved.
Killian understands that no one gets out of a deep pit on their own. It’s been her life’s work to ensure that others have the tools they need to emerge from the pit of trauma and it’s symptoms—including homelessness and addiction and depression. Her talk explores how community can lead to healing, and how healing is learning to embrace fear instead of love.
Defining Equity. Pursuing Unity.
In this 2021 TEDxSeattle talk, James Whitfield shares his passion for diversity, inclusion, and the power of discussing complicated issues and relationships. He goes on to pave the way for a more unified world.
James explains how the decision to nurture unity, to recognize we do not have to be uniform to be unified, is in our own shared interests to forge a mutually beneficial future. In his talk, James discusses how to successfully pursue unity by focusing on equity in different aspects of our lives and why having those uncomfortable conversations are critical to our growth and healing.
Building Resilience and Community in the Service Industry
In this 2021 TEDxSeattle talk, Melissa Miranda shares her experiences with a broken, abusive restaurant industry, and her dreams of a better way of leading—through kindness, community and compassion.
When Melissa started her own restaurant in January 2020, she envisioned a new business model centering around collaboration and empowerment for her employees. The pandemic proved to be a test of her new community philosophy—a philosophy that resulted in a thriving restaurant, proving that what is good for people is also good for business.
How Curiosity Will Save Us
For Mónica Guzmán, curiosity isn’t a muse that flits by when we wonder about something. It’s the most powerful tool we have to navigate our world, especially when our world is dangerously divided along political lines. “If you can’t be curious across divides in a polarized world,” she says, “you can’t see the world at all.”
Mónica shares examples of curiosity-driven conversations that make it possible for even the most opposed liberals and conservatives to see and hear one another, despite the misperceptions from their news feeds. With simple, powerful questions she herself has used in countless treks across the divide, Mónica shows us how having critical conversations with people—instead of about them—changes everything. And how taking the first steps toward understanding the views that most confound us isn’t just possible, it’s easier than you think. Mónica is Director of Digital Storytelling at Braver Angels, the nation’s largest grassroots, cross-partisan organization dedicated to bridging the political divide. She is a former fellow at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, studying political division, and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, studying community engagement. Mónica is the co-founder of the Seattle newsletter The Evergrey and was a juror for the 2013 and 2014 Pulitzer Prize in journalism. In her 17-year journalism career, she’s written columns for The Seattle Times, GeekWire, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Daily Beast, and others. A Mexican immigrant, Latina, and dual US/Mexico citizen, she lives in Seattle with her husband and two kids and is the proud liberal daughter of conservative parents. Her book, I Never Thought of It That Way, comes out in March 2022.
Reviving the Labor Movement
In this 2021 TEDxSeattle talk, Margaret Levi shares her ideas on what roles labor unions play in our lives and futures, and how we need to imagine and build better labor organizations for the 21st century. Margaret explains how labor unions balance the playing field by protecting the rights of workers. She discusses how the dramatic decline of labor unions contributes to an increase in inequality and is jeopardizing the middle class well-being of generations to come.
How mRNA can heal a fractured world
In this 2021 TEDxSeattle talk, Lynda Stuart explains how mRNA vaccines have been a triumph of modern science in the fight against COVID-19. But in a world where healthcare should be a human right, the vaccines after the COVID-19 pandemic have marked the divide between the haves and the have nots. From vaccine researcher to advocate for equal access, Lynda explains why the mRNA vaccines used to fight COVID-19 have the potential to solve supply chain hurdles that have prevented entire regions from building widespread immunity, granting access for all.
Liberating education: how schools can empower and transform
In her 2021 TEDxSeattle talk, Trish Millines Dziko asserts that the teaching techniques most commonly used in our public education system are in need of radical reform. She asks, “What would happen if we rebuilt public schools to develop the genius in every student, and give them the tools to be critical thinkers, problem solvers, ideators, and leaders?” She explains how her nonprofit organization successfully collaborates with public schools to help change school culture, implement project-based learning, center racial equity, and enable students to actively participate in their own education. Through real-world examples and stories, Trish’s talk challenges us to consider how we can promote student-centered teaching, and ensure our schools are educating, and not just “schooling” our youth.
Change our buildings, save our planet
Andrew Himes’ 2021 TEDxSeattle talk is an impassioned plea for buildings that help solve climate change instead of contributing to it. With a sense of hope, Andrew asserts that working together to solve the climate crisis gives us the opportunity to “regain a sense of our shared humanity.” As Andrew explains, the materials used in construction, the movement of those materials, and the current massive building boom combine to make the buildings in which we live and work one of the leading causes of carbon emissions. The good news is that we already know how to create buildings that store carbon and help heal the planet. We can reuse and improve buildings instead of tearing down or using new materials, and we can all demand that the buildings in our community are built to protect us instead of harm us.