Poverty, passion and perseverance, all on one platform.

Around 100 TCU students and staff attended the TEDxTCU talk Wednesday night in the Moudy North Auditorium for a program entitled “Responsible Citizenship.”

Speakers included three TCU students and one faculty member: Alex Lipari, Barrington Hwang, Amberle Durano and Chuck Dunning of student development services

TEDx is an extension of the TED talks program that was developed in 1984. Ted is a nonprofit devoted to “ideas worth sharing”, according to their website. Each speaker is encouraged to bring a different perspective to an overarching topic.

The TEDx program localizes the original TED idea by allowing organizations, communities or individuals a license to hold the event under the TEDx name.

Wednesday’s theme worked off the TCU mission statement that says TCU students will work to be responsible citizens.

Speakers touched on various aspects of responsible citizenship including how to deal with poverty with lasting results, speaking with civility and following through with one’s goals.

“We’ve seen TED talks in different classes for different things and to actually see TCU students do them was actually pretty cool,” Maddie Reddick, a first year political science major, said.

Kathryn Waggoner helped plan the event by obtaining the license and organizing the speakers. She said the event was about the community.

“To do something for the community, to create a conversation within a community to allow a community to spread the ideas that TED spreads on a national level but to do that locally, to give local people a voice and to really generate conversations within communities,” the senior strategic communication major said.

Other students said they learned more about their peers by attending the event.

“I learned that a lot of people at TCU have great ideas and TED is an awesome way to be able to communicate those ideas with everybody,” Jimmy Sweeney, a sophomore supplies chain management major, said. 

“We all know the mission statement and it seems like it gets repeated by rogue sometimes,” Dunning said. “But to know that our students are taking that to heart and finding all kinds of different ways that it makes sense in their lives, that’s something that I think is real impressive."

TED stresses the importance of distributing information, Amit Lalvani, a sophomore accounting and finance double major,said. “Ideas do not come only from the really accomplished people, not from the really smart people, it comes from everyone.”