KAROL KUDYBA
News Writer

On Nov. 13, St. Thomas More College hosted the popular TEDx conference series.

A hundred “Tedsters”— yeah, they’re called that — paid $64 to attend Saturday’s expo that featured speeches from luminaries Lieutenant Governor Gordon Barnhart and Princess Shop founder Ainsley Robertson.

The Saskatoon event is part of a movement kicked off by something you might have seen on the Internet, TED Talks. TEDx is the local level equivalent.

The Technology Entertainment and Design series is a non-profit organization that tries to disseminate ways in which individuals can change their world.

After each conference, videos of the speeches are made available for free at their website and their mirror site. Every year the series gives out a prize of $100,000 to try to make one speaker’s wish come true.

With an 18-minutes-per-speech formula, it forced the speakers to get their ideas through as quickly and clearly as possible, and not waste time with attention killers like complex statistics or adjectives. It doesn’t matter if you were a former president of the United States, 18 minutes is all you get.

The x series are independently organized TED events, created to produce conversation at a local level, managed by local people.

With conferences taking place all over the world in cities such as Arusha, Edinborough and Palm Springs, it was only natural that Saskatoon would be next.

Saskatoon TEDx was almost entirely volunteer-run and purposely put a cap on the number of tickets sold in order to create a more personal atmosphere — during breaks, speakers made themselves available to the crowd.

related article: TEDx a phenomenal experience

Like all TEDx events, they also featured TEDTalks videos — the free content the original conference is famous for.

The topics at Saturday’s conference varied from Caroline Schur’s talk on the importance of sleep to Ellen Quigley’s proposal that Saskatoon could be the primary contributor to the world’s garlic industry. But a similar vein ran through all the speeches: start small. Whether it’s getting to know your politician by sending a monthly hand-written letter, or by tapping into your creative subconscious by writing down your thoughts immediately after waking up, all of the speeches tried to emphasize how a little change can have a big impact.

Amy Jo Ehman’s speech, “Eat Locally ”“ Live Globally,” emphasized the difference that a person could make simply by trying to find and eat local foods. Ehman spent an entire year trying to only eat foods made in Saskatchewan, in an effort to reduce her own personal dependence on imported food.

There were, of course, limitations.

“It would be much easier to do this now than it would be five years ago,” she noted. But even when she took the challenge, goods like wine, olive oil and lemons couldn’t be found provincially made.

Ehman was frank in saying, “It’s not feasible for the great majority of people. I have the time and it took a lot of time to pull this off.”

As with the other speakers’ proposals, a sweeping life change isn’t necessary to follow her advice.

“Shop at farmer’s markets and make them your first source for food,” she said. “Buy in bulk when it’s fresh and in season. Break for food when driving through the country side. Find it in your heart to celebrate the seasons and the food as they come into season.”

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image: Pete Yee