Photo credit: wemedge
TED (and by extension, TEDx events) are all about being a platform for ideas worth spreading. But just because you weren’t invited to speak at TED or a TEDx event doesn’t mean you don’t have great ideas to share!
We want to know what your TED-worthy ideas are!
Maybe you’ve a invented an incredible new product or service in the technology, entertainment and/or design field (or, really, any field).
Maybe you have insights, ideas or applications for existing technology, entertainment and/or design that the world needs to see.
Perhaps you have an incredible experience or epiphany to share that could transform others.
Or maybe you just have a new way of thinking about any topic that will blow our minds.
Whatever your TED ideas are, we invite you to share them on this blog, or post them on Twitter using #tedxavl and #tedxasheville tags. (Or just reply to our Tweet here)
And to get a better idea of just what makes an idea TED-worthy, check out videos of past TED speakers at www.ted.com
Soni Pitts, a TEDxAsheville Organizer
This event is not being organized by the TED conferences — this is an independently organized TED event.
Soni here. I have two ideas to share:
1: Create an Asheville Community Farm (a real, full-sized permiculture farm) staffed by volunteers, low-risk punitive community servicers, college students doing community service and a small paid staff. It’s purpose would be to supply MANNA food bank, plus local shelters and schools, with fresh fruit and veg, as well as to sell at the tailgate markets and through CSA shares (for sustainable self-funding). It would also serve as a research space for sustainable, intensive, integrated and permaculture growing techniques.
2: Put free internet cafes, entrepreneurial incubators and employment-training classrooms in every housing project. The entrepreneurial incubators and employment-training centers could self-fund by sharing the profits of the entrepreneurs’ products (like an Etsy shop or something) and creating something like an outsource call center as part of the employment-training program. Or you could combine them by using the employment trainees to run the entrepreneur shop.
My mini-TED idea is that the community tutoring system needs a radical redesign. As a former literacy vol, I have anecdotal data that 20% of all adult learners in community literacy centers are too learning disabled to learn to read through working with community tutors– rendering community tutoring centers as they exist now useless for 20% of users.
For these students — low-income adults without the funds to pay for the costly one-on-one tutoring they need to make progress in learning to read — even the place of last resort offers no hope. Some struggle for years with little or no progress towards their goal of the most basic functional literacy: the ability to read a map, read a street sign, write a check or fill out a job application.
The trend in adult basic education is to cater to the GED student, the person who is reachable through community tutoring. This leaves 20 percent of adults in literacy programs nationwide faced with a lifetime of poverty and illiteracy and nowhere to turn for help.
My idea? That all community tutoring centers need to serve these people too, and every center should have at least one staff member professionally trained in working with LD learners.