TEDxYouth@Granville looks to enlighten minds of tomorrow

TEDxYouth@Granville will be enlightening the minds of tomorrow as they arrive at The Dance Centre on June 28. The conference will be bringing together a diverse group of students to foster the spread and application of wonderful, local ideas to provide them with a platform to inspire and to be inspired.

Run entirely by a group of local high school students, the conference is truly made for youth, by youth.

The line-up of speakers ranges from various inspiring adults and students, consisting of:

Adult Speakers

Miyoung Lee – CBC News Reporter

Multiple Webster nominee and RTNDA winner, Miyoung Lee rings in her 11th year with CBC as the host of CBC News Vancouver at 11 p.m. She is also a daily contributor on News Now with Ian Hanomansing on CBC News Network.

Lee began her career as an intern at CBC the day before the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York and so began her journey into reporting some of the biggest stories of the next decade including the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games, the Queen of the North sinking and the taser death of Robert Dziekanski. Lee worked as a producer and director for CBC Radio One’s The Early Edition before moving into television as a reporter and producer with CBC News Vancouver.

Her community and career ambitions are evident as her accolades continue to grow with multiple regional and national RTNDA awards, Jack Webster nominations, the CanWest Global Systems Broadcasters of the Future Award, The Ruth Hancock Scholarship in Journalism, Senator Vivienne Poy Leadership Award to name a few.

Rene Wang – Actress

Rene Wang is a multidisciplinary entrepreneur, artist, and change agent. A real estate investor since her early 20s, she is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Illumina Investments Group, which focuses on the acquisition and development of commercial real estate in the United States, with a specialization in retail centres.

As an artist, she has acted in movies and American sci-fi shows like “Fringe,” “V” and “Arrow,” as well as co-produced and hosted a tri-lingual travel & wine show pilot in France. She published a best-selling travel book about Europe in Chinese to inspire youths in Chinese-speaking countries to expand their horizons.

Youth Speakers

Vivek Chachcha

Vivek Chachcha is a third year Computer Science student at the University of British Columbia, currently on co-op working as a Software Developer Intern at SAP Vancouver. From his early years, Chachcha has been a strong believer in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields, and pursuing this interest, he has had the opportunity to explore many facets of STEM and their applications. To further elaborate on the process through which STEM education allows, Chachcha will be speaking about the three ways in which we can redefine the limitations of what we perceive to be reality: enrichment, empowerment and exploration.

Anushka Kurian

Anushka Kurian is a grade 11 writer, youth journalist and humanitarian who believes that a world of peace, unity and acceptance begins with finding those things within yourself. In a talk that explores the modern challenges her generation must face, the overlooked importance of respecting yourself and why self-love is an alarmingly shrinking force, she harbours a question that challenges youth to decide for themselves who they are. “What is success?”

Chris Bolton

Chris Bolton is a grade 12 student from North Vancouver. His talk will follow the social change created by innovative youth using empowering technology. Currently, Bolton works at HootSuite as a software engineer and volunteers with The Next Big Thing Foundation as their National Youth Ambassador. He’s spent the last three years working with schools and districts across Lower Mainland to bring computer science education to the forefront of curriculum. Last summer, he helped organize The Next Big Thing’s CodeCamp, a two-day event that introduced over 250 students to web programming. Bolton also plays an active role as an advisor to organizations such as the YWCA Metro Vancouver to develop workshops and sessions aiming to raise the level of digital literacy among young students.

Zamina Mithani

Entering her first year at the University of British Columbia, Zamina Mithani is an active youth leader and who aspires to shift paradigms in order to empower communities. Through volunteering annually in Karbala, Iraq, she has witnessed unbreakable cycles of poverty shackled by corruption. Therein she realized that popular forms of charity failed to focus on the community at need, but rather the motives of the donor. Not only does this experience continue to affect her own community involvement, as a leader in Model United Nations, interfaith dialogue, and community service with disabled children and seniors but it also affects her view of humanitarianism globally. By examining why we give, or why we don’t, she hopes to be a catalyst for discussing how can we work collectively to give to right causes, in the right way, and for the right reasons.

Jan Lim

Entering her Grade 11 year as an International Baccalaureate student at Sir Winston Churchill Secondary, Jan Lim strives each day to make a meaningful contribution to her local community. She holds an immense passion for student government, having being elected as the Vice President of Churchill for the 2015-16 school year. Dedicated to helping others achieve, Jan is also the Co-President of Starts With One, a non-profit youth organization committed to raising funds for disadvantaged schools and students within the Vancouver region.

Furthermore, she is also an advocate for autism rights. Being personally connected to many youth with autism, Jan hopes to reveal the reality of the mental disability and uproot its misconceptions. Acquainted with the incredible lengths to which those with autism can exceed expectations, Jan hopes to inspire a newfound comprehension of the disability.

Vivian Lee

Confucius once said, “In serving your father and mother you ought to dissuade them from doing wrong in the gentlest way. If you see your advice being ignored, you should not become disobedient but remain reverent. You should not complain, even if in so doing you wear yourself out.” Highly appraised, in Chinese culture, Confucius’s teachings remain some of the most influential in modern-day education in Asia. However, are Confucius’s values considered old- fashioned and contradictory to western education? Was Confucius wrong?

On June 28, 2015 (which marks her 10th year in Canada), Vivian Lee hope to inspire youth to volunteer, travel and discover the opportunities available to them. As part of an ethnic minority, she hopes her involvement with scientific research, achievements in sports, and recovery from mental illness triggered by conflicting Western-Chinese beliefs will inspire youth to strive for greatness.

Duncan Stothers

Duncan Stothers is a grade 12 student from St. George’s School in Vancouver. Innovation and ‘inventing solutions to everyday problems’ has been a major focus within his life. In the last five years, Stothers has pursued his passion for inventing: finding solutions for problems such as designing a biodegradable packing material, designing a new bike frame which prevents head over heals (pitch over) after crashing head on and novel new ways to cool computer CPUs. Every invention has challenges – overcoming these and being able to persist at times of failure is a key in seeing inventing dreams come true.

TEDxYouth@Granville 2015

When: June 28

Where: The Dance Centre – 677 Davie Street, Vancouver

Website: tedxyouthgranville.ca

Vancity Buzz is a proud sponsor of TEDxYouth@Granville