Theme: Designing Your Life Within Your Community

TEDxHalifax, in collaboration with TEDxNovaScotia, will bring together the province's foremost thought leaders, change makers and everyday people from a broad range of disciplines and challenge them to deliver powerful and unforgettable talks. TEDxNovaScotia is a provincial collaboration of multiple TEDx events and is designed to bridge the divide between urban and rural Nova Scotia to share ideas under the common theme of Designing Your Life Within Your Community. TEDxHalifax willl be held on June 10, 2011, at the Waterfront Campus of the Nova Scotia Community College with an affiliated stage at the Atlantic Festival Theatre at Acadia University (TEDxNovaScotia).

NSCC Waterfront Campus
80 Mawiomi Place Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
Halifax, Nova Scotia, B2Y 0A5
Canada

Michael Warren

Dr. Warren possesses a unique combination of skills – he is a practicing veterinarian, an online strategist, and regularly participates in veterinary projects in developing countries. He is dedicated to merging these passions to help build sustainable businesses to support social development. Dr. Warren is a practicing veterinarian in Halifax, and consults in the area of online advancements for veterinary practices worldwide.

Jenn Grant

With her third album, 'Honeymoon Punch', Jenn Grant raises the white flag high. It’s time for peace, but not for quiet. The album is a spiked Love Potion No. 9, a frisky concoction of spirited, synth-sweetened songs balanced with muted, natural elements – between “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” and Radiohead’s In Rainbows, Phoenix meets Judy Garland. Released January 11, 2011 in Canada and slated for a November release across Europe, 'Honeymoon Punch' is making fans and critics fall in love with Jenn Grant all over again.

Camelia Frieberg

Camelia Frieberg is the co-founder of Pollination Project, a social enterprise dedicated to workshops and events on arts, ecology, health and society. Camelia is a filmmaker and film producer, as well as the proud mom of two children, board member of the South Shore Waldorf School and Kindergarten, board member of the Nova Scotia Food Policy Council, BALLE-NS and the Jane Goodall Institute of Canada. She is also the farm manager of Watershed Farm which participates in local farmer's markets on the South Shore and operates a CSA with shareholders along the South Shore and Halifax.

Evan Jones

Stitch Media partner Evan Jones, is a two-time Emmy Award® winner whose innovative work on interactive content for primetime television, radio, web, mobile and games have established him as a pioneer in new genres of Alternate Reality Games, Locative Media and Interactive Documentary. His work was recognized as one of the ‘Top 10 New Media Groundbreakers’ according to the Bell Broadcast & New Media Fund. Evan’s international clients include Microsoft, Disney, FOX, CBC, Bell, Discovery and The Movie Network. He has taught ‘Rich Media Production’, ‘Transmedia Storytelling’ and ‘Extending TV Drama Experiences’ around the world at the Canadian Film Centre, the Australian Film, Television & Radio School and the University of Southern California with Dr. Henry Jenkins.

Silver Donald Cameron

Silver Donald Cameron is the host and executive producer of the ambitious environmental web site TheGreenInterview.com. He is best-known as the author of 17 books, numerous plays, films, radio and TV scripts, an extensive body of corporate and governmental writing and innumerable magazine articles. His most recent books are Sailing Away from Winter (2007) and A Million Futures: The Remarkable Legacy of the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation (2010).A former columnist with the Globe and Mail, he currently writes a weekly column for the Halifax Sunday Herald. Dr. Cameron is also a distinguished educator. He has been a faculty member or writer-in-residence at eight universities, and served as the first Dean of the School of Community Studies at the University College of Cape Breton in Sydney, Nova Scotia. He holds honorary doctorates from Cape Breton University and the University of Kings College. He now lives in Halifax.

Mike Grandinetti

Mike Grandinetti has a unique cross-disciplinary background. He has deep operating experience as a serial venture capital – backed entrepreneur across four very successful ventures, was involved as an early team member in the launch of several successful new businesses within Hewlett-Packard, holds long-standing faculty appointments at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the Technical University of Denmark Center for Technology, Economics and Management and has been deeply involved in regional and national economic development, with a distinct focus on global entrepreneurial coaching and enablement, innovation policy and innovation cluster acceleration, as well as advanced technology commercialization and tech transfer, in the US, Canada, and Europe. He also served as a senior management consultant with McKinsey, the world’s premiere strategy consultancy.

Jonny White

Jonny White proposes that two of the most powerful forces shaping our lives are (1) the way we tell our own story and (2) the stories we experience through media (including the Web, TV, ads, books, film, and mobile devices). As a media psychologist and lecturer, he lives and teaches his philosophy about shaping and choosing our stories wisely, while writing and producing media designed to have positive psychological effects. At 30, he has created an award-winning web-documentary, earned two undergraduate and three graduate degrees, started and sold a web-based company, kitesurfed on three continents, and bicycled from the top to the bottom of Africa. Strictly due to his ongoing research on how our stories create our reality, Dr. White may tend to seem a little uncertain about whether he is awake, dreaming, or just making it all up.

Ian Slayter

A native of Halifax, Ian Slayter is a psychiatrist with the Capital District Health Authority where he serves as the Clinical Director of General Psychiatric Services. He chairs the Mental Health Quality Council and leads the Mental Health Consumer, Family, and Provider Collaboration Initiative. He believes that leadership and healing begin with awareness, especially listening to the other person and one’s own intuition. Dr Slayter has worked in the past in Pictou County, Pennsylvania, and Maine. He has served as the Adult Psychiatric Consultant with the Department of Health, board member of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, president of the Nova Scotia Psychiatric Association, and president of the Pictou County Medical Society.

Sean Gallagher

Sean Gallagher is the founder of Terroir - Local Source Catering, and Local Source Market & Bakery. The three linked businesses all feature local, seasonal, and often organic foods. The North End market has become a community hub offering cooking classes for seasonal cooking, group tours for primary to university students, a gathering place for many local agriculture based talks while supplying transparent, quality local food to the market place all year long. Sean spent his formative years in Africa, as his family was involved in International Development. He has also worked for CARE in Bosnia. His international experiences have broadened both his tastes and his views, leading him toward a life of running a small business with an environmental & social bottom line. Sean's food philosophy is simply to get back to the basics. He believes life should be lived appreciative of the simple pleasure of eating well with the seasons. Time should be invested to cook and enjoy good food. Understanding the interconnection with the food that is cultivated in our region and the value of supporting a healthy food system that adds value to our culture, our economy and our land.

Jennifer Berry

Jennifer has been involved in the food industry, locally and globally since 1993. She has worked for both entrepreneurial high growth companies such as Ocean Nutrition Canada as well as large multinational organizations including National Starch, in Halifax, Toronto and around the world. After 15 years in the food industry, she understands how the current system works. Year after year, people are becoming more and more removed from their food. Awareness of food is not top of mind for most people, but it should be. Food is vital and every day, without even realizing it, we all decide how and where our food is grown and produced. Jennifer wants to help people understand how our small, simple, local choices have an impact at home and around the world. Jennifer earned a BSc in Food Science from the University of Guelph. Throughout her career, as an active member of the food industry, Jennifer has enjoyed speaking on food and nutrition in Canada, United States, Europe and Australia to varied audiences. Creating and promoting new ideas, through relationship building is her greatest strength. Jennifer believes that community contribution is a crucial ingredient for happiness and prosperity. She currently volunteers on the Board of the Nova Scotia Food Alliance, as the Chair of FUSION Halifax, a Volunteer Facilitator for the Canadian Centre for Diversity and in the past has been a Fair Trade Educator for the Just US Development Education Society, Big Sister, Volunteer on the Feed NS Chair a Tea Committee and more. A mother of two, she loves living and working in Halifax, close to family, friends and the ocean.

Ben Caplan

The music of Ben Caplan & The Casual Smokers is diverse, ranging from poetic ballads to frenetic gypsy anthems, but even when the band delivers the roughest of bar room stomps, there is a surprising depth and musicianship to the songs. Expressive percussion, upright bass, violin, sax, clarinet, flute, and terrific use of call and response sing-along choruses all help Caplan & The Casual Smokers stand out from the masses influenced by the same sounds.

Jason Pelley

Jason Pelley became passionate about sustainability, civics and political ecology while attending Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. After working in the green construction industry he became a LEED and sustainability consultant, a writer, researcher and political advisor and has held advisory roles with municipalities, post-secondary institutions, and the private sector. Active in a broad swath of sustainability and social issues he has presented or acted in representative roles at conferences and summits throughout the world including as a Panel Chair at the United Nation’s World Civic Forum. After this extended period of work and travel he was convinced by longtime friend Evan Price, to help establish FiddleHop Farm a fiddlehead and beer hop farm in Glenholme, Nova Scotia where Pelley is Co-Owner and Director of Research. The first hop farm of its scale in Nova Scotia it focuses squarely on partnerships for research and innovation; and community engagement to show young people that farming is a viable option for a career or step off point.

Jim Trussler

Jim Trussler is CEO/Co-founder of LST Energy – a startup commercializing a patented system to burn hay in traditional furnaces and boilers. Scientists have for decades been unsuccessfully trying to find a method to use hay for conventional heating applications. LST found a way. The system has been tested over two winters by the NS Agricultural College and exceeded expectations. This breakthrough enables a flood of new opportunities for farmers to monetize hay crops, entrepreneurs to process the hay into fuel pellets and consumers to cut their heating costs in half – all in addition to the enormous environmental benefits of using hay instead of oil. Jim is a long time entrepreneur. At his core he is a CA specializing in international tax and finance. Over the past decade and a half he has been involved in 6 startups ranging from emergency medicine, to 3D innovations, social media apps and precision metal products. His current business bases are Halifax, Toronto, Barbados and Pictou.

Shakespeare by the Sea

Shakespeare by the Sea is a dream that became a reality. In 1994 a group of artists were invited by Patrick Christopher Carter, Jean Morpurgo, and Elizabeth Murphy to perform William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park. With no publicity other than word-of-mouth these performances attracted over 2,500 people in a single weekend. With this resounding support from the community and excellent critical notices, Shakespeare by the Sea Theatre Society was incorporated on September 19, 1994. In the eighteen years since, the company has produced dozens of productions with the goal of providing high-quality accessible theatre to residents of and visitors to Halifax. The company’s work has been called “Highly energetic, epic and imaginative, from wide-screen spectacle to hushed intimate drama, the best theatre under the sun”, and it continues to provide compelling entertainment for the price of a donation.