VANCOUVER – Tales of early expeditions to Antarctica had a ship’s audience completely engrossed before a call over the PA system compelled the lecturing explorer to suddenly stop.

The group pulled on jackets in a hurry, threw open doors and stepped from story world into reality, where pods of 30 killer whales surrounded their southbound boat.

Selin Jessa found her sea legs on the grand vessel’s deck, and watched the big, beautiful creatures breach in and out of the ocean.

“In our world and in this life over here (in North America), we get caught up in the day-to-day and forget to be open to those sorts of experiences, and we miss them,” Jessa said in recollection.

As the moment sank in, she grew acutely aware of the significance of caring for the earth.

“Sometimes it feels very hopeless when you want to try to make a difference,” she said.

“But when you realize everything is interconnected … it becomes easier to do your part.”

Though spoken like a sage woman checking off her bucket-list, the 16-year-old from Coquitlam, B.C. believes her journey has only just set sail.

The Grade 11 student will share her insights during a 12-minute talk with 200 high school students and a global online audience at an upcoming Vancouver forum, which will bring several other engaging youth speakers to the stage.

The April 5 event, called TEDxKids@BC, is an authorized spin-off of the popular idea-sharing TED conferences that are held around the world, but independently organized. Its founder describes it as the biggest of its kind in Canada.

Goran Kimovski’s goal is to transform young people into active participants in their own education. He hopes they’ll be galvanized to change the world.

“The current education system doesn’t really cater to the natural instincts that kids (have) for learning,” said the father of two daughters, ages eight and three, who tailor-made the event to fill the void.

The B.C. parent is striving to be a mentor to his kids instead of solely an authority figure, and that prompted him to connect with other educators who theorize that children are filled with drive and learn best by doing.

“It’s not so much about producing a conference in the traditional sense, it’s about creating an experience,” he said.

Youth volunteers are paired with adults who help them run the event at all levels, from selecting speakers to co-ordinating logistics to managing the website. A Grade 11 student will act as MC, while others will film the presentations and post them on tedxkidsbc.com in the following weeks.

The event’s theme is moving inspiration into action, and will coincide with a TEDx event hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that will be held the same day in Berlin.

“It’s especially valuable that it’s coming from youth because it shows that we do care about change,” said Veronika Bylicki, who will orate on urban sustainability.

The 17-year-old from Vancouver said the forum’s youth-driven approach is powerful.

“Discovering things and exploring things that you’re passionate about, instead of just learning them from a textbook, can be especially important,” she said. “You feel like your learning is relevant.”

The Kids@BC forum had its premiere last October, and its youngest speaker was a 10-year-old girl who instructed her audience on how to transform any observation into a creative writing story.

Some time after Kishal Scholz’s talk, the parents of a 12-year-old boy who attended the speech told organizers that afterwards, their son had holed himself up in his bedroom for days.

Finally, they realized what was going on.

“He decided that he was going to try to write his own story,” Kimovski said. “That’s something that triggered in him.”

Another talk, called “sustainability begins with a smile,” was given by 17-year-old Aliya Dossa. The exposure helped in part to spread her program Youth4Tap, which encourages teens to switch from bottled to tap water, into dozens of schools, Kimovski said.

Jessa is now feeling a “cascade of emotions” preparing her own environment-themed talk, which will be dotted with descriptions of penguins, icebergs and cruising around Antarctic islands on New Year’s Day.

“It’s a big job that I feel like I have to do, to pass that message on,” she said.

She said her aim is to leave people with a sense of hope, which perhaps jump-starts others towards taking positive action, too.

“I definitely think that bringing together different perspectives is key toward solving any of the big challenges our world is facing,” she said.

A third Kids@BC event will be held next October with the theme of Connect.Inspire.Act.

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Tamsyn Burgmann, ©  Thursday, March 29, 2012 11:30 AM
Read it on Global News: Global BC | Kids hope to inspire each other at TEDxKids@BC in Vancouver

The TEDxKids@BC team is rolling up their sleeves in 2012 to organize not one, but two events!

On April 5th, 2012, TEDxKids@BC will be hosting a special event in partnership with TEDxChange, which is co-organized by TED and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Held in Berlin, TEDxChange aims to take a step back and look at the big picture, inspiring conversations about how to encourage positive change in issues of local and global importance like development, health, and environmental damage.

Our event, TEDxKids@BC Change, will be held at Science World in Vancouver. Besides showing the official program from the Berlin event, TEDxKids@BC Change will also feature a number of youth speakers from around BC who are already working towards positive action in the areas aligned with TEDxChange themes. Geared towards high school students, TEDxKids@BC Change promises to be an opportunity to listen to amazing speakers, connect with other passionate young people, learn about global issues, and get involved with change-making efforts in our community.

There are so many ways for you to get involved. Are you a young person (or kid at heart) who has an idea worth sharing? Have you taken action on one of these issues? Do you know someone who has? Check out our Call for Speakers for TEDxKids@BC Change! Applications are due March 1st, and we can’t wait to hear about your ideas. Stay tuned here, on Twitter, or on Facebook for updates on other ways for you to get involved. Let the adventure begin!

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.” — Dr. Seuss

On September 17, we held our inaugural TEDxKids@BC event. It has been an overwhelming experience and words can’t describe how we all felt at the end of the day! We worked really hard and the past few months leading to the event have been particularly tough as we all volunteered our time on top of our jobs, school, families and other duties so many of us ended up running on 3-4 hours of sleep for weeks.

As you can imagine this was toiling and have put our health at risk, so we took the time to rest, spend time with our families and move slowly on all but the essential wrap-up tasks around the photos, videos, evaluation forms, etc. But now it’s time to use our renewed energy and look forward to the next year — as one of our young team member said: “TEDxKids@BC did not end on September 17, 2011, rather it opened the pages and dipped the quill for the beginning of a new chapter for the world.”

But before we do that, I’d like to share the story of this year!

As I am sure many of the TEDx organizers that already went through their first event will agree, seeing the event unfold is a life-changing experience. It was one of the most amazing and awe-inspiring days in my life! The feedback from the speakers, audience, partners, volunteers, even the people that watched the webcast has been absolutely positive and uplifting making it all worthwhile!! These are just few quotes from the members of the audience:

“TEDxKids@BC was one of the most amazing days of my life. It was absolutely incredible to see so many amazing, incredible, unique kids changing the world and bringing awesome ideas to light, and seeing the inspiration that the attendees took away from that was wonderful.”

“TEDx events are an incredible vehicle for honest, imaginative conversation between people of all ages and from all fields. I learned this first at TEDxUBC and then I was blown away at TEDxKids@BC.”

“Yesterday was a wonderful event and I pass on my thanks to all of you who put in the effort to create such a great event. I found myself saying, ‘If only I had something like this when I was young.’”

“We are still talking about it everyday and telling others about it. We are taking what we learned and adding it to our lives and sharing the stories with others to inspire them”

“Both of my sons were inspired by various speakers at the event and as parents we were excited about the energy and focus that the event created within us and our children. We are long time TED fans and were so grateful to be able to attend an event live. The fact that it focused on kids was a definite bonus! ”

“It was priceless to see the connections formed between people, and even more amazing was the way that the connections grew over the Internet even now, a week after the event. TEDxKids@BC is so much more than a conference – it’s a community of inspired people who communicate year-round about how to empower themselves and empower kids.”

The two biggest values for me lie in the connections I made with some amazing young people (whom I am proud to call friends!) and the opportunities we have created for some of these young people to apply their passion and creativity in making the event and increase their self-confidence.

We have invited kids to partner with the adults on the team and lead important roles during the planning and production of our event. These are the roles that were driven fully or mainly by youth:

One of the teachers of the high school students that did the filming gave us the following feedback:

“The kids felt like professionals and treated as co-workers in the successful making of TEDxKIDS. They were on fire and totally engaged. This is what teaching looks like… or should I say learning. Give them relevant things to do, offer meaning, give them freedom, facilitate the opportunities to take risk and be successful and they will learn deeply.”

We’re planning to turn TEDxKids@BC into a fully youth-empowered platform with the adults providing mostly mentorship and support. We believe that putting youth in the driving seat is the best way to empower our growing community of kids that came away inspired from our event this year and can’t wait to come back together again to start planning the next one.

This post was originally published at the TEDx Tumblr blog.

Try to imagine a future without kids. It hurts to even think about this, right? It’s a nightmare we better never see! How about kids without a future? Unfortunately, the world in which many kids have no future already exists — we live in it every day.

I am not talking runaway climate change roasting the biosphere here — from poverty, to no access to clean drinking water, to diseases, to no basic human rights — examples of this kind abound. But the kids also face problems like outdated school systems, inefficient healthcare, disconnectedness from nature, society that values conformity over authenticity…

In our world, adults decide for the kids: From serving chocolate milk during school lunch to opting out from vaccines… From cutting school budgets and enforcing standardized testing to choosing energy sources and CO2 limits… From what to learn and whom to learn with to when and how to play!

What right do we have to make these decisions for them? More experience and knowledge? Maybe, but our experience and knowledge is limited to the world of NOW! We and our kids learn the world of tomorrow together — they have to catch up on history but they’re quick learners. …Continue reading →

“I know of no other advice than this: Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.” -Rainer Maria Rilke

Working Playing behind the scenes at TEDxKids@BC is getting exciting! There are a little over two months left between now and our September 17th event and we’re gearing up to build you an empowering and inspiring experience.

Our team is shouting from Internet rooftops to spread the word of the event. So far, TEDxKids@BC has been spotTED in Saskatchewan, Hong Kong and Haiti and we’ve tagged friends from all around BC, Argentina, Serbia, Spain, and Amsterdam! Join in and let us know what part of the world you hail from. …Continue reading →

Hey kids!

Join the TEDxKids@BC friends by playing our new poster game,

“spotTED!”

We have a great new TEDxKids@BC poster and we want you to help us show it off to the world!

…Continue reading →

At TEDxKids@BC we love to mix dream and play! We hope you do too and will help us with one of our big dreams — yes, we have many! — by playing a game of tag. But before explaining what we have in mind, I will allow myself a little digression.

I started the TEDxKids@BC journey with a dream to see the birth of a global conference focusing on children — TEDChildren I called it. I wanted to see a community form to support and nurture  kids’ creativity and passion without squashing their authenticity for the sake of fitting them into predefined roles in our society. I figured, we adults are so bad at dreaming, we can’t possibly imagine what the world will look like in the future for our kids. How can we then know what is best for them to learn in order to prepare for that future? The answer to this was obvious to me — and I hope you agree too! — we can invite them to try and figure out the future together with us and we can support them in their efforts to reshape it for themselves. …Continue reading →

“Children do not need to be made to learn to be better, told what to do or shown how. If they are given access to enough of the world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to themselves and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world then anyone else could make for them” ~John Holt, (1923-1985) American Educator, How Children Fail

As I was thinking about how to write a post that will best describe the vision behind TEDxKids@BC, I decided to check the definition of the word “empower“. The following made a true impression on me:

Make (someone) stronger and more confident, esp. in controlling their life and claiming their rights.

As parents, community and society, that is exactly what we want for our kids, right? Who doesn’t want the future generation to be strong and confident, in control of their life and able to assert their rights? I doubt anyone would answer no to that question! …Continue reading →

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
“Pooh,” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw,
“I just wanted to be sure of you.”

There were many times in my life when I would dream, often with my eyes open, but it wasn’t until sometime last year that some of those dreams popped out of my head and started running in front of me. It wasn’t something I did that brought them to life. Nor could I control them once they were on their own either. All I could do was to touch them to be sure of them. …Continue reading →

In my previous post I explained how I let my dreams out of their cage and decided to have fun on Twitter promoting the TEDChildren idea. Let me pick up the story where I left off.

It was awesome to see people all over the world noticing my little experiment and showing their support! What felt like a silly game brought me lots of encouragement to keep on dreaming. Until the branding police came in two weeks later and asked me to stop, that is. What an “adult” thing to do, I thought — once the game is seen as a risk for the kids to break something, we put a stop to it. I decided not to be discouraged! …Continue reading →