A group of Parksville volunteers is organizing the city’s first TEDx event to present some bright ideas on sustainability and innovation from locals and other Islanders.
It’s scheduled for May 13 at Ballenas Secondary School.
TED events are talks by individuals with interesting ideas that they want to share. Presented in 18 minutes or less, they began in 1984 and have since become world famous. Thousands of TED Talk videos have been posted to YouTube and have gained millions of views.
Some of those views have come from Ballenas Secondary School, said Graeme Nailor, a teacher and one of the organizers of the upcoming TEDx Parksville event.
“We use TED Talks in our classes a lot,” he said. “They are always coming up on Facebook and referred to through the TV and things like that.”
He said the benefit of the talks is that they often challenge the status quo or encourage viewers to look at the world in a different way. Also, because the aim is to communicate an idea only, it doesn’t end up being a pitch to buy something.
“We’ve had them in staff meetings quite a bit over the last number of years, and I thought, ‘why don’t we run our own TEDx here?’”
TEDx events are independently organized TED events, which draw primarily from the community in which they are organized, as well as surrounding communities to find people with innovative and thought-provoking ideas to share.
Nailor and a group of about five other volunteers settled on a theme of sustainability and innovation for the event, which aims to address how people can live sustainably while embracing innovation. Though they had originally considered focusing on education, Nailor said the sustainability theme will hopefully encourage more of the general community to attend.
Some of the scheduled speakers include Phillip Perry from Coyote’s Coffee Roastery, who will be speaking on working with small, family-owned and operated farms; Jeff Hopkins of Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry; and Jacob Stevenson, a former Ballenas student who set to work building a tiny house from scratch and posted the progress to YouTube as the Tiny Nest series.
The Ballenas Interact Club will also be speaking, discussing micro loans they have made in other countries.
There will also be student performances and other entertainment.
The full-day event runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Ballenas Secondary School auditorium on May 13.
There are just 100 tickets for the event, priced at $50 each. They can be purchased at Ballenas school, through the Ballenas Online School Store, or at Coyote’s Coffee.