Transcription of Adam Burk for the show Global Villages #51
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Hour Radio and Podcast, show #51, Global Villages, airing for the first time on September 2nd, 2012 on WLOB and WPEI radio, Portland, Maine. The show is also available streaming live, WLOBRadio.com and via podcast on iTunes. Show segments and full shows are available on DoctorLisa.org. Sitting in the studio with me this morning is my co-host, Genevieve Morgan, part of my global village. Hi, Genevieve.
Genevieve: Hi, Lisa. Isn’t it interesting that we’re talking on Labor Day and it seems to take a lot of labor to create a global village?
Lisa: We’ve been thinking that we are creating this global village in a small way and hopefully a bigger way as we go along, and we know that it’s happening. We know that the conversation is being generated because people contact us via Facebook, they send us emails, they stop us on the street. It’s been a very interesting process and it’s one that is so valuable, so it’s interesting for us also to be speaking with Adam Burk and Anouar Majid because they’re doing something similar and they’ve understood the challenges and also the hope that’s generated and the inspiration and the difficulties, so it’s helpful for us to sit amongst likeminded individuals as we try to create our own global village.
The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is proud to be sponsored by the University of New England. Sponsorship of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast has included for the past year a wonderful segment we call UNE Innovations. This weeks’ UNE Innovation talks about relationships. Early relationships, not brain power, are the key to adult happiness. Social connection is a more important route to adult well-being than academic ability. This study from the Journal of Happiness Studies tells us that positive social relationships in childhood and adolescence are key to adult well-being.
Associate Professor Craig Olsson of Deakin University and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia and his colleagues tell us that academic achievement appears to have little effect on adult well-being. The exploratory work is published online in the Springer’s Journal of Happiness Studies. Olsson and his team analyzed data for 804 people followed up for 32 years and explored the relative importance of early academic and social pathways to adult well-being. In particular, they measured the relationship between a level of family disadvantage in childhood, social connectedness in childhood, language development in childhood, social connectedness in adolescence, academic achievement in adolescence, and well-being in adulthood.
The researchers found a strong pathway from child and adolescent social connectedness to adult well-being that illustrates the enduring significance of positive social relationships over the lifespan to adulthood. The analysis also suggests that the social and academic pathways are not intimately related to one another and may be parallel paths requiring investments beyond development of the academic curriculum. For more information on this Innovation, visit DoctorLisa.org for more information. On the University of New England, visit UNE.edu.
Announcer: This portion of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast has been brought to you by the University of New England, UNE, an innovative health sciences university grounded in the liberal arts. UNE is the number one educator of health professionals in Maine. Learn more about the University of New England at UNE.edu.
Lisa: On today’s Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we’re speaking with Adam Burke who is the executive director for TEDxDirigo. Hi Adam. How are you?
Adam: I’m very good, thanks, and you?
Lisa: Very well. I met Adam not too long ago at a TEDx event and, of course, I went to a TEDx event, Latitudes, I think it was, maybe about a year ago. I was really impressed with what you’re doing. I’m not sure everybody in the state of Maine is familiar with TEDx, so tell me what that is.
Adam: Sure. I think a lot of people are familiar with the TED talks which are 18 minutes or less and available widely online from Sir Ken Robinson is a popular one that people see on their Facebook page or inbox, and those come out of a conference that happened in Long Beach, California and in Edinboro, Scotland, and they’ve been going on for about 25 years. Starting in 2009, TED created the TEDx brand where x equals an independently organized event, so since 2010, we’ve been putting on TEDxDirigo which focuses on Maine ideas. We’re spreading, leveraging the TED talk format as well as the event design.
Lisa: Adam, tell people what TED actually stands for.
Adam: Sure. TED originally stood for technology, entertainment, and design because in 1984 when the conference was founded, Saul Wurman thought those were the fields that were shaping our future and since then, it has become more broad so it’s just commonly known as TED.
Lisa: There are fellows now. There are people that actually have made TED, in addition to you, their big living. This is what they do for work.
Adam: Yeah, so the TED Fellows Program has been going on for, I think, three years now and it’s a global program where they’re bringing in people that are working on world-changing ideas from our own Alexander Petroff who works on Working Villages International in Congo to people working on bio-architecture and devices that can quickly scan and determine if water is safe to drink in disaster areas.
Lisa: What is the format of a TED talk for people who aren’t familiar with TED or TEDx?
Adam: The TED talk is founded on a rebirth of storytelling for the digital age in particular, but it’s someone sharing what they’re passionate about, what they know about, in a very compelling way that’s personal and meaningful. The TED talk relies on visuals to some extent to accentuate what somebody’s talking about, but it’s a far departure from boring PowerPoint presentations that include lists of text and people reading off the slides. It’s a talk done at its best.
Lisa: You have people who will do some work with the speakers themselves to have them be more comfortable and have them be able to put their point across?
Adam: Yes, that’s right. In year one, we allowed speaker coaching to be an elective piece and we found very quickly that people, despite if they were rampant public speakers that they didn’t know how to give a TED talk. It’s not something that we commonly do, so we do provide coaching for all our speakers.
Lisa: I think it’s important to note that these talks are truly inspiring and some of them are actually transformational, so I can see why people would be intimidated going out and trying to do their own TED talk.
Adam: Yes, it’s a very vulnerable place to be. It’s about connecting with the audience in authentic way. It’s not just about showing research or giving the same talk that we’ve become accustomed and kind of numbed out to giving. It’s about giving it in a fresh way and really putting yourself out there.
Lisa: Was Seth Rigoletti, your most recent, I think, speaker coach. Is that right?
Adam: Yeah, we have a cadre of speaker coaches. Janice O’Rourke’s our Executive Producer and she heads up that team and Seth Rigoletti is one of our lead coaches as well Elise Derosa and this year, we also have Bridie McGreavy and John Marshall working on that team.
Lisa: I only bring up Seth because he was, of course, on our show so I’ve met him and it was very interesting to have him come in and talk about breathing and being present and exactly what you’re talking about. This authenticity that you really have to go deep and have that be part of what you’re doing in order to not convince people, but to bring people in to your story.
Adam: Yes, Seth’s a dynamic coach. I got to work with him at Portland High School where we worked with AP English students that were finishing their senior year and watched him help them unlock what they were passionate about and how to talk about it. It was magic. It was pretty exciting stuff.
Lisa: Why did you do this? What is your background and what drew you to bringing TED to Maine?
Adam: My background is a zigzag path across many fields and professions, all held under the umbrella of wanting to live well in my place and with others, so I’ve been a teacher, I’ve been a social worker. I’m a Maine guide. I’ve been a carpenter, a baker. A typical Maine trajectory with many, many different hats and fields, but all my life I’ve been motivated to imagine what life could be and was, of course, very disappointed by a lot of the things that I saw in my life, whether it was the abuse of my good friend by his parents or it was the destruction of the woods down the street from my house, there were just all these things that were very harmful to people I loved and places I cared about and wanted to help create a better world.
TED’s a place where people like myself gather that are hopeful, positive, optimistic, but also realistic and put their feet on the ground and get stuff done. It’s not just about daydreaming.
It’s about actualizing those things while being imaginative, so TED was a community for me that I immediately resonated with and then when the opportunity came for the TEDx Program, I got involved because there are so many people that I love here in the state of Maine and I want people to know what we’re doing here in the state and connected to not only people outside of the state but also in the state because I’ve talked to people and they just wouldn’t know that we had this incredible deep offshore wind farm in development or that the Telling Room was down on Commerical Street, and this was a powerful platform to tell Maine stories.
Lisa: I think that Genevieve can relate to this because Genevieve did a lot of work with the Telling Room, is still involved with the Telling Room, and it is the power of story that seems to bring people to believe, to have hope.
Genevieve: I will say after food, water, and warmth, what do humans do in the history of man? What do they do? Of humanity, I should say. They tell stories, so we don’t think of storytelling as being a necessity, but it’s actually the fourth thing that people will do because it creates community and we would be lost without community.
Lisa: This is really about this idea of villages which is the reason that we had you come in and talk to us today because you’re building a village in a very different way than what some people might think of. You’re not out there with your hammer and your nails, although you’ve done that before, apparently, as a carpenter, but you’re building a village of sort of like-minded individuals.
Adam: Yeah, it’s a place for authentic dialogue about things that we’re passionate about and it doesn’t mean that we all have to agree on a particular talk that’s been on the stage, but we’re open to having the conversation in a way that’s not common, certainly not what’s in the comments of most of the online publications, so what we’ve been doing is creating this multidisciplinary cross-sectoral village as an experiment for the past few years through TEDxDirigo.
What we’ve also discovered is we’re part of a massive global village. I was in Doha, Qatar with 750 other TEDx organizers earlier in April of this year, and it was a powerful experience to be with people that are like me, that are into organizing and bringing these communities together, but these are people that are on the ground where the ground’s literally shaking whether it’s in Tunisia or Egypt or in Baghdad and elsewhere, and it’s a tremendous asset now that we have as Mainers, too, that we’re connected to that global village.
Lisa: You’ve described yourself as having this zigzag path and TEDx is only, or TED has only been around for 25 years. Is it interesting to you that you’re doing this job that really didn’t exist when you started your life?
Adam: Sure, but it also makes sense for me. I’m not surprised by it. I’ve always been entrepreneurial in that way that I’ll just go out and create a space for myself that allows me to live within my passions and express them and help others to do so, so this just became a sturdy vehicle to do so.
Lisa: What are some of the topics that you’ve brought in and had people speak about for TEDxDirigo? How many of these have you had now?
Adam: We’ve had three full-day events and headed towards our fourth.
Lisa: What are some of the topics and speakers that you think have been the most powerful?
Adam: Our talks have been seen by more than 350,000 people around the world and more than 25,000 in the state, which are good markers to me that the stories spread, and of those, the ones that have spread the most are Zoe Weil’s talk on humane education and her work there to transform the education system to create a generation of solutionaries, and that’s a great talk from our first year. At Latitudes last year, Roger Doiron’s talk about his subversive plot to get everybody to grow their own food was wildly popular and was selected by TED to be on their home page.
We’ve also had Steve Wessler from the Center for Preventing Hate which is a very powerful, powerful talk that calls on us all to be courageous. Most recently, we had Lyn Mikel Brown talking about her work with SPARK and Hardy Girls Healthy Women and the tremendous work that she and women all over the country are now doing and Liz Neptune also gave a very powerful talk that talked very poignantly to us. The event was here in Portland and she came down essentially as a delegate from the Passamaquoddy and talked pretty frankly with us about perceptions that we may hold about some of the initiatives that have happened up there and what it’s actually about for them, and so that was a powerful bridging of villages.
Lisa: These are all available where for people who’d like to go back and listen to them?
Adam: They’re all on TEDxDirigo.com and you can click on presenters on the top and all the talks are available there as well as YouTube and you can like us on Facebook and find us that way, too.
Lisa: We’ve interviewed Les Otten on our show and one of the theories that he brings up is this theory of disruptive thinking, that when you introduce an idea that changes people’s perspectives, you can cause real change, real transformation. How do you choose the speakers and how do they get to that point where they’re the ones who present the idea or the philosophy?
Adam: We go through a pretty exhaustive process to get to our program and we generate a list of over 200 people at any given time that we’re whittling down to 16 for a program that we’ve curated around a common theme like Villages this fall, so those nominations come in from people nominating themselves or somebody else via our website. We’re always generating our own lists of who’s out there via media, via conversations with industry leaders and asking for their shortlists, and then we have also started holding tryouts where people who register first get a chance to stand up in front of a live audience and give it a go.
In terms of how people get to that point is different as the individual, so it’s informed by people’s life experiences. It’s things they just kind of fell into whether it was through work or life and it’s always something that clicked with them in a very deep way that this is what their life’s about and this is what they’re going to do, and then the quality of their talking isn’t so much a qualifier. It’s more the quality of the idea and the possible impact or its relevance at a particular point in time because, again, we do work with coaches that help people give the talk of their life.
Lisa: How are you able to hone your own idea of authentic living? What was the process that you went through because it does, again, you have this exact path, but I know you also have an education background, so were there steps you took in your own life?
Adam: Yes, so it’s been a decades-long process at the very least that started when I was 18 and I moved from New Jersey to Boston and I was going to Boston University and studying psychology which was one of my first loves, and at the same time, just bumping into myself and cognitive dissonance between who I wanted to be, between truths that I was discovering around the world. I started learning about Buddhism and started practicing meditation and just had particular experiences that really awakened me to some things that I think are well-described by Eastern philosophy, so that severely disrupted my world view and things that I thought were important.
That really started me down that path, and then it was again about what I was able to do as I put life together, what experiences were offered to me, and again, just staying true to certain principles within my own life. Always trying to be humble and to serve the greater good are just two simple things that I live by, and those just unfolded and my graduate degree in education was a synthesizing moment as I studied education as a broad field. My love of learning had persisted despite my formal schooling, so I was really interested in what else was available and studied things from Waldorf to Montessori to Reggio Emilia to free schooling to what was happening in various charter schools around the country.
Through that, I wrote a thesis that was called “Holistic Connections Between Ecology and Character” which really brought together two trains of thought that inform who I am as a person and one is ecology and that’s part of my background as a wilderness guide and naturalist, and also character development which is rooted heavily in Eastern philosophy, and seeing that these two things were essentially part of and extension of each other. Within that framework is how I can now walk out into the world and feel like a whole person instead of someone that’s fragmented by that zigzag path that didn’t always make sense to me.
Lisa: That actually kind of harkens back a little bit to Thoreau except that he went out into the wilderness and really never came back. You’ve gone out into the wilderness and come back and are really attempting to live this authentic life that you’ve described.
Adam: Yes, I’m trying very hard.
Lisa: Do you see a synergy between technology, entertainment, and design which is a very broad platform? What you’re talking about is deep. It’s going in and I think, if I’m correct, because I’ve been to TEDx and I’ve talked with you before, you’re really trying to get people to look inside as well as connect externally. How do you see that working as we move into the next decade?
Adam: It’s an interesting question that I pose to myself because I’m actually quite a digital native which is interesting because I’m just as comfortable being out poking through the woods looking through mushrooms as I am being pretty prolific on social media, so what I’m finding through the TEDx event and the global community as a whole is that technology is integral to keeping and fostering that community in between events, but that opportunity to come together, be in person, put the phones down, and look at each other in the eyes and say, “What are you passionate about?” and “Tell me about that,” and connect on that level is vital.
That’s the real glue. The rest is kind of reaching out for one another where we can start to get a sense, but the magic happens once we come together and we can be with one another in that space.
Lisa: You did something, I think that just ended very recently where you did this whole Farm to School project and it’s kind of similar where you’re kind of reaching deep and digging into the soil and connecting to something very tangible, but I also understand that you involve technology and connections and it wasn’t just one school. Can you describe that for people who are listening?
Adam: Yeah, sure. For two years, I worked on a federal grant project that was targeting obesity prevention and we were working with 12 schools across 2 districts in Southern Maine, and our strategy was to increase access to healthy food and physical activity and my passion was the farm to school element of that, so I did a lot of work connecting cafeterias to local farmers to working through distributors as well as retraining cafeteria staff and bringing in the folks that were the reality behind the reality for Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution in West Virginia, and they did a boot camp for all the food service folks in two districts.
It was a pretty magical time and it was cool to see people get empowered around that we can be creative and we can do this. It doesn’t have to be what we’ve been doing, which again is the spark of TEDx is that “Oh, we can do it differently.” We created this distributed network of people across those schools as well as elsewhere in the state so people commonly empowered each other to keep going and then created feedback loops with the students so that really encouraged people to also keep putting better food on the plates.
Lisa: I imagine that this can’t have all been easy. You’re talking about generating hope and living authentically and you’re working with the digital technology, but also sort of a back-to-the-earth. What are some of the challenges that you’ve encountered personally and under the umbrella of TEDx?
Adam: Challenges have been busyness and managing myself, my commitments; being realistic about what I can change for myself, first and foremost, and then secondly, what I might be able to change outside of myself. Maintaining balance is the fundamental challenge, so I’m constantly working on that, making sure I have time to play, making sure I have time to be with my family as well as do the hard work that needs to be done if we want to turn the corner.
Lisa: Are there people in Maine or elsewhere that have been particularly influential or supportive as you’ve gone forward on this path?
Adam: Yeah, I couldn’t possibly name everybody. I’ve been deeply influenced by my mentor, Wolf Richards, who I first met when I landed in Bridgton, Maine, and then as we’ve pulled TEDxDirigo together, the support that we’ve received from people internally who helped put on the event. It’s all run by volunteers who put in over 2,000 hours per event to make it happen. Our partners like Maine Magazine or the foundations, Quimby Family Foundation and Lerner Foundation, other businesses, other individuals that just really see this as being vital and important and have helped us since day one.
Lisa: How do people attend TEDx?
Adam: You can attend TEDx by requesting an invitation and you can do that online at TEDxDirigo.com.
Lisa: I’m very interested in the fact that it’s a cross-section of ages. That’s what I’ve noticed having gone to TEDx, having gone to some of the before and after type events, but I do notice a preponderance of what I would call young people. I still like to put myself in that category, but I know that you’re young and Gil from Frontier … He’s pretty young. He’s up there doing this stuff. Do you feel like you’re sort of moving your generation forward in a positive way? Is this important to you that sort of the seventh generation idea?
Adam: Yeah, it’s vital to me. I did hear after Latitudes that it was one of the most engaged, multigenerational communities that some attendees had seen that was outside of a school, so that was important for me to hear. I see TEDxDirigo as being part of what is a beacon for folks my age and younger even to help reverse the brain drain that we talk about in Maine that it does talk about these really exciting things that are meaningful to people of younger generations. They can see that it’s happening. They can connect to it in a visceral way and they can get involved, so yeah, that’s a vital part of this experience to me.
Lisa: It can’t always be easy to maintain hope. Do you ever feel yourself getting discouraged?
Adam: Sure, if I read the news too much. That’s what I also try to maintain as my media diet and I do get discouraged. It could be when I see behaviors and it could be stupid things during the day when I just see people being unconscious about their actions and the ramifications whether it’s throwing litter out of a car which is an age-old kind of hippie irritation, but just not understanding our impacts on the world around us and however that manifests does rub me wrong and it comes back to “Well, I need to make sure I’m doing what I need to be doing and if people want to talk to me about what I’m doing and learn from that, then all the better, but it’s not anything that I’m going to force on anybody.”
Lisa: The next event is October 20th at Bates College in Lewiston?
Adam: Yes.
Lisa: It’s called?
Adam: Villages.
Lisa: Genevieve’s already asked how you can register, so that’s TEDxDirigo.com.
Adam: TEDxDirigo.com. We have limited seating and we will sell out for sure.
Lisa: Yes, I can attest to this that it’s a very difficult. It’s a place you want to be. Let’s just be clear. It’s a one-day event.
Adam: It’s a one-day event. It’s from 9am to 5pm.
Lisa: Do you know what the future looks like as far as TEDxDirigo and as far as Adam Burk?
Adam: Sure. No, I don’t entirely, but continuing to do things that are deeply meaningful. We are in the process of minting a nonprofit organization that will do TEDxDirigo and more and we’ll be filing paperwork in the coming weeks. To answer the question of how is this sustainable and also what comes next, after every event, it’s a very powerful, moving encounter, but people are always looking for other ways to be engaged on a more regular basis and we haven’t been able to do that under the guise of TEDxDirigo and on all volunteer power, so this new organization’s going to provide physical spaces as well as more event and programmatic spaces that people can dream and develop solutions together.
Lisa: We appreciate your coming in and talking to us about how you’re building a global village and your upcoming event, Villages, at Bates College in Lewiston on October 20th, so we wish you all the best. Really, this is very inspirational and the idea of authentic living, it sounds like you are living you’re life authentically and you provided people who are listening today a means of moving forward in that direction as well, so thank you.
Adam: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be talking with you.