TEDx, Creativity and Carolina

This Saturday, Carolina Creates will host its inaugural TEDxUNC conference at 1 p.m. in the FedEx Global Education Center. In keeping with the mission of Carolina Creates, the conference will focus on fostering “creation through connection.”

Connecting our campus’s innovative and passionate people to existing resources is the surest way to cultivate creative ideas for our community and the world.

Creativity will prove the most reliable guide in navigating an uncertain future — especially uncertainties like those UNC currently faces.

Fostering the creation of new and unexpected connections is at the heart of Carolina Creates’ mission. In our hyper-specialized world, cross-disciplinary communication is more important than ever.

And it is in this vein that all the Carolina Creates initiatives — Music, Visual Arts, Writers and Global — have come together for this TED-inspired conference.

With a focus on interdisciplinary approaches, TEDxUNC will bring together leaders from diverse fields to discuss today’s most pressing problems and ways to address them in the future.

This year’s TEDxUNC conference will bring numerous accomplished authors, philanthropists, scientists, entrepreneurs and artists to campus, connecting them directly with students.

It will also showcase some of UNC’s best artistic talent, including Mipso Trio, Bhangra Elite, Jordan Humphrey & Christian Adams, VIRGINS, Blake Larson and UNC Wordsmiths.

In an effort to promote the realization of UNC students’ innovative ideas, we’ll also be announcing the winning teams of the Campus Y’s new Social Innovation Incubator at the conference.

This four-hour conference wouldn’t have come together without exactly the kind of cross-campus collaboration Carolina Creates hopes to promote.

Our committee assembled a wide-ranging group of sponsors, from Innovate@Carolina to Tea Talks, from The Blackstone Charitable Foundation to the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East. And none of it came out of students’ tuition or fees.

Thanks to our sponsors’ generosity, hundreds of students will interact with the speakers both at the TEDxUNC conference and at more intimate dinner discussions throughout the weekend.

For those unable to attend, we encourage you to watch Reese News’ live stream of the event on www.reesenews.org.

Many students have also organized viewing parties, allowing students to watch and discuss the conference with their peers. More information on viewing party locations is available on www.facebook.com/TEDxUNC and www.tedxunc.com. Full recordings of the talks will be available after the conference on our website and on TED.com.

This is the first of many TEDxUNC conferences to come, and we are excited to share this event with you. We look forward to inaugurating this new, annual tradition at UNC.

For more information on future Carolina Creates events and how to get involved, visit www.facebook.com/CarolinaCreates.