One idea at a time

By NIchole Livengood  

MARCH 24, 2011 11:37 a.m. (0)

And bringing them to Greenville was the goal for the second annual TEDx Greenville.

In all, 434 industry and community leaders, elected officials, students and creative folks  filled The Peace Center’s Gunter Theater to hear from 12 people chosen from 100 nominees.

They were educators, musicians, filmmakers, inventors, slam poets, parkour action heroes, belly and flamenco dancers, community activists, branders, philanthropists, athletes and environmentalists.

“One of the measures of our success was that we identified people the majority of our attendees had never heard of,” says Marc Bolick, who headed up the TEDx Greenville programming team.

Columbus, Ohio-based educator and Bloomington TEDx  co-planner, Christian Long presented a redesigned educational system that honors kids as creators, believes that every idea is valuable, and empowers students to not be afraid of failure.

“Schools are doing their best to value engineer this word out, but failure is not an end,” he says. “We need to get out of the way of our kids.”

Greenville’s Shannon Pierce explained how through the grief over the loss of three of her brothers, she found inspiration for her life’s work.

She created the patented CareCam Documentation System, which she hopes will replace cumbersome documentation methods as the standard of care in the medical community.

Pierce’s message for the crowd:  “Don’t be afraid of what we will suffer.  Harness your pain and say a prayer and make a difference.”

Derrick Goodwin shared the impact of storytelling as he took the crowd on a journey through growing up in Greenville’s tough Jesse Jackson Townhomes.

For 110 days filmmakers Jeremy Make and Andy Raney drove a golf cart across 6,000 miles of America’s back roads to ask people “What is your art?”  Greenville was one stop on a trip that will ultimately become a documentary.

Throughout the day there were performances by the Fine Arts Center Classical Quintet,  singer/songwriters Angie Aparo and Neil Brooks, acoustic guitarist Bob Kilgore, “honkabilly” band Note Ropers, and a high energy parkour performance during which a Greenville group showed off their extreme acrobatics.

Graphic recording artist Breah Parker stood side stage throughout performances rendering the day in drawings displayed in the lobby or “spin area” during breaks.

A flat screen on the wall displayed real time tweets from attendees under the hashtag #tedxgvl.  Upstate editorial and commercial photographer Ian Curcio was set up as well, capturing event goers with dry erase board in hand expressing a bit of their own ideas to change the world.  Curcio closed TEDx with a slide show of his work.

“From a programming standpoint, this was a homerun. We stepped up the variety and diversity of presentations, performers and presenters from last year,” says Bolic. The first TEDx Greenville was the launched on March 5 to a sold out crowd at CU-ICAR.

TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading in the areas of technology, entertainment and design.

It began in 1984 and now includes two annual conferences in Long Beach and Palm Springs and also TEDGlobal in Edinburgh UK.

TEDx (x= independent TED event) events have sprung up across the nation highlighting local thinkers as well as intellectual notables from across the globe.

TED talks can be viewed at www.ted.com or on YouTube.

Speakers have included Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jane Goodall, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Philippe Starck.

Event planners are accepting nominations for 2012 TEDx Greenville.

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