TEDxUWMilwaukee Hosts Virtual Conference Series

TEDxUWMilwaukee hosted their first of three events in their 2021 Virtual Conference Series on Saturday, April 24, the speakers using the art of storytelling to share the importance of education and leaving the fear behind.

The 2021 Virtual Conference Series, with the theme “Our City, Our Story,” was originally scheduled to be an in-person conference in April 2020. However, organizers postponed and reformatted the event to be a virtual Zoom conference this year. The second event in the series was on April 27 at 6 p.m. and the final event will be on May 8 at 10 a.m.

TEDxUWM Milwaukee is a student-run organization with the mission of working toward a better world by “giving those with an idea worth spreading a stage to share it,” according to the organization’s website. While affiliated with the national TED organization, TEDxUWM is an independently organized event, indicated by the “x” in its title.

The pre-recorded speeches from the speakers were followed by a live question-and-answer.  TEDxUWM President Avery Deboer and Director of Curation Markia Silverman-Rodriguez emceed the event and asked questions to get the Q&A started before asking audience-submitted questions to the speakers.

“Without a doubt, the biggest win of going virtual has been the opportunity to have the Q&A for each event,” Silverman-Rodriguez said. “If this was a live, in-person event, normally what we would do is just have like 10 speakers all in one session, just one really big long day, and that’s really fantastic but having this virtual setting allowed us to split it up into multiple dates and then because we were only having two or three speakers we had the time to engage with the speakers and have that audience interaction.”

Silverman-Rodriguez said that she started working on the team that was putting together this conference in the summer of 2019 just after she joined the organization’s executive board. Silverman-Rodriguez said that the team kept almost all of the same speakers that were planned for the April 2020 conference for the April 2021 conference. All of the speakers at this year’s conference have been working with the TEDxUWM team since 2019.

“We’ve definitely formed some really nice relationships with these speakers,” Silverman-Rodriguez said.

The April 24 event hosted three speakers, Becky Curran Kekula, Karen Ellenbecker and Anita Mogaka, who talked about a variety of topics all centered around the larger theme of “Our City, Our Story.”

UWM alumnus and businessowner Mogaka told her story about growing up as a Kenyan American, her time at UWM and her journey to create a digital media platform to share stories of “Black excellence.”  She spoke about dominant narratives, or narratives told through the perspective of dominant culture, and how they are harmful to Black people and have been throughout history. She started her business, The B.E.E. Narrative, to “celebrate [Black] excellence by highlighting the positive stories of Black people, places and experiences. She said she decided to create this business to tell Black stories in an accurate way. She also started virtual events throughout 2020 to promote messages like “Black is Beautiful” and “You matter, and your voice matters,” among others.

“It’s time that we look at ourselves as storytellers, as community narrators, weaving together the fabric of our stories and unlocking a future of new possibilities,” Mogaka said.

Curran Kekula, founder of DisABILITY in Media, is part of the disability community and currently serves on the Board of Advisors for the National Center for Disability Journalism at Arizona State University. In her talk, entitled “Disability is not the problem… Fear is the Problem,” Curran Kekula shared her story about being diagnosed with achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism and how her disability is not the problem, society’s “fear of disability is the problem.”

“Disability does not discriminate,” Curran Kekula said. “Anyone can acquire a disability at any point in their life. It’s possible to see someone beyond their disability. Only through interaction will the unfamiliar become familiar.”

Karen Ellenbecker also addressed fear in her speech, as her talk, entitled “The Power of Positive Disruption” was about making decisions that can change the course of our lives for the better. She said being a positive disrupter is “someone who challenges the status quo” and “works to find positive alternatives; changing how we think, behave and how we do business.” Ellebecker shared her story of going from being desperate to find a job to becoming a stockbroker to now owning her own investment company that she started 25 years ago.

“If we want to become a catalyst for positive change, we cannot think our way through it, we must be willing to let go of the fear of making a mistake or being judged and have the courage to disrupt our own lives for the better,” Ellenbecker said.

The speakers at the April 27 event were Neil Dogra, Stacy Clark and Aisha Valentín, and the speakers at the May 8 event will be Rae Senarighi and Raj Hayer.

To register to attend the May 8 event, visit the TEDxUWM registration form. To apply to be a speaker at a future TEDxUWM event, visit their website.