TEDxUNC conference shares ‘ideas worth spreading’

As attendees of the TEDxUNC conference walked through the doors Saturday morning, they were given tags asking them to write down two things — their name and their idea worth spreading.

Nine speakers and six performers touched on a variety of such ideas — from reducing concussions in football to finding artistic inspiration — but the theme that tied them together was a call to action.

“The fear of maybe getting it wrong never really goes away,” said Corey Ford, CEO of Matter Ventures and one of the speakers at the event.

Ford, a former Morehead-Cain Scholar, said career paths are changing now.

He said the steady climb to the top had been replaced by the “drunken walk” between flairs of inspiration and sharp focus.

“Now, more than ever, we need people who don’t know what they want to be when they grow up,” he said.

The idea of having urgency in life was applied to more than just careers.

Andrea Reusing, a Chapel Hill chef, spoke about the aspects of food that most people ignore.

“I think it’s striking when we spend so much time talking about food but so little of the conversation is about the human face behind the food we eat,” she said.

Reusing encouraged the audience to be more involved with the foods they buy.

“At a store, be ready to engage in conversation and tell them that you care,” she said.

The less-established acts onstage showed how they were just as committed to following what they were passionate about.

Allen Mask, a recent UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication graduate, gave a performance called Rebel Music, which he said was a unique hat-tip to black history.

“It wasn’t 100 percent poetry or 100 percent rap,” he said. “There are an infinite number of influences.”

He said he was trying to spread his history in his own way.

In a surprise final appearance, junior Laura Rozo, one of the student speaker contest finalists, took the stage to talk about living her dreams while in a hospital bed fighting cancer.

Rozo said she only found out two days before the conference, while in the hospital, that she would be performing.

“I was like, ‘How can I get out of here?’” she said. “I told my doctors, ‘I’ll be back.’”

She told the crowd about how she had gone skydiving after learning her cancer had reappeared and said she still taught salsa lessons from her bed.

“Don’t procrastinate on living,” she said.

Contact the desk editor at university@dailytarheel.com.