Even on Guitar Hero, I’ve always beautifully sucked. I call it beautifully sucking because it’s still fun to do something you’re not super great or experienced at doing, especially when the people you’re jamming with are enjoying the hell out of themselves.

So, why show up to the TEDxConcordiaUPortland Adventure on Friday, May 3rd, 2013, when it was geared specifically toward guitar maintenance? Simple: it’s totally awesome being in the company of people who are passionate about what they do (and if you’re involved with TEDx in any capacity, you’re going to find that). It was obvious that the teachers, the girls, and all of the people involved with the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls are passionate about female empowerment. Watching the teachers move from girl to girl, guitar to guitar, it is obvious that they want girls to succeed on their own terms, whether it’s by rocking out on a guitar that she has learned to repair by herself or by using her voice to express herself authentically, to collaborate with others to create a kickass song or a badass magazine, like Portland’s own She Shreds.

The camaraderie was evident in this small space. The girls laughed, helped one another, and shared stories as they worked on their respective guitars, (mostly) not minding that I took pictures of them as they did so. The night ended with a performance by two of the girls from the camp in a jam session on the drums. (One lucky dude even caught the end of their performance as he jogged past the open garage door at ADX and stuck around for the remainder of the show, clapping enthusiastically when they finished the set.) The passion that these girls felt for their music was evident, palpable, and totally inspiring, which fit right in line with TEDxConcordiaUPortland’s desire to collaborate with the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls and She Shreds.

The most inspiring thing about this adventure was getting to be a part of how music, community, and passion created a space that was safe for each individual to explore ways to groove in the world. “Even though we’re a rock and roll camp,” Beth Wooten, Executive Director of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, told me, “teaching music is one fifth of what we actually do.” The organization—like TEDx events, speakers, planners, and attendees—is interested in working with the girls, specifically to inspire. Collaborate. Express. Create. When people come together to authentically do these things, some pretty awesome shit can be written, can happen, can be enjoyed together in the company of those who dig it, too.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve never played guitar, lived in a tiny house, or sung with a bunch of strangers, all of which have been opportunities for connecting with TEDxConcordiaUPortland. What matters is that you show up, make awesome stuff in a way that feels authentic to you, and teach and learn from others.

Rock on.

Be sure to RSVP and purchase a ticket (for a small fee) on Eventbrite.

Please bookmark this post and check back often as we will be developing new ADVENTURES! to share. Also follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook to keep up to date.

Read our previous ADVENTURES! post for more about our inspiration.

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Roller Derby
Hosted by Juvie Hall
Saturday, June 1, 2013 at 6:00 PM at Oaks Bottom Roller Rink
Reserve Your Space

Introduction to Roller Derby group skating class. Join Juvie Hall at Oaks Park Roller Rink to learn skating tips and roller derby rules and techniques. Appropriate for all levels of skating ability. Class includes skate rental, an hour of instruction, and entry to the 7:00-10:30 pm public skating session at Oaks Park. Must provide your own helmet (bike helmets are totally acceptable). Wacky outfits encouraged (but not required)!

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Learn to Sketchnote Crash Course
Hosted by Doug Neill, The Graphic Recorder
TBD

If you’re into TEDx, then you’re already passionate about ideas. Here’s your chance to learn how to illustrate ideas in real time using a combo of words and pictures. Many people already do this because IT’S FUN. Turns out it’s also good for your brain—helps you process and remember the idea you’re sketching out. Illustrating ideas on the fly is called sketchnoting, and that’s what I want to teach you to do. Join me on this adventure for a crash course in sketchnoting followed up with some live practice at a local event. You’ll be jumping right in because that’s the best way to learn. But you won’t be alone. Come sketchnote with us.

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Past ADVENTURES!:

Guitar Maintenance for the DIY Guitar Tech
Hosted by Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls and She Shreds Magazine
Friday, May 3, 2013 from 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM at ADX

Fix your guitar yourself! Learn basic maintenance, common repairs, intonation, action adjustments & simple schematics for re-solder in this 90 minute workshop. Bring your guitar or work on adjust one from the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls’ gear library.

There will be free guitar strings provided by Guitar Center. Also, after the class, local band Voices will perform for free and beverages will be provided as a lead into “ADX First Friday”.

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Community Art Project
Hosted by Rebecca Shapiro
Sunday, April 14, 2013 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM at Place in Pioneer Place Mall

Join acclaimed Portland artist, Rebecca Shapiro, for an afternoon of artistic exploration and collaborative social engagement untangling the stories, beliefs and behaviors that bind. The threads we uncover will be brought to life on paper at Place gallery in Pioneer Place Mall.

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Adventure Bollywood!
Hosted by Prashant Kakad
Thursday, April 11, 2013 at 7:00 PM at Living Room Theaters

On Thursday, April 11th, come teleport to the dream city Mumbai, home to the alluring Bollywood film industry. We will be watching the film Slumdog Millionaire, selected by the celebrated Bollywood entertainer, Prashant. Prashant gave a TEDx talk in 2011 and co-hosted TEDxConcordiaUPortland in 2012, this year he will take us through a unique adventure. There will be a post movie discussion facilitated by Prashant.

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A People’s Choir
Hosted by The Delicious
Saturday, March 9, 2013 from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM

A People’s Choir is a monthly group sing-a-long hosted by The Delicious, an artist collective based in Portland, Oregon. Every month a theme is chosen and choir members (whoever wants to come) suggest songs via social media that they want to sing. Lyric books are provided. The choir simply sings along to the sound recordings—anything goes!

The choir began in 2011 out of nostalgia for communal singing. The power of singing together was so overwhelming that they just kept singing. Since the first choir, A People’s Choir has hosted choirs at PSU’s Open Engagement, New York’s Art in Odd Places festival, Last Thursdays on Alberta, and monthly at their winter home—The Waypost.

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Tiny House Tour
Hosted by Dee Williams and Portland Alternative Dwellings
Saturday, March 2, 2013 from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM

There’s a lot of chatter about reducing your carbon footprint, living more sustainably and with intention, and for the past year one group of friends has been walking their talk in a brilliant new way. They lovingly call it “POD 49,” and it includes their three homes, the greenbelt between them, and the innovative idea that they’re better together than apart.

Join Dee Williams, a TEDxConcordiaUPortland 2011 speaker, and Portland Alternative Dwellings (www.PADtinyhouses.com) to tour POD 49, with a focus on:

• Micro Housing—Tour Gina’s little house, offering a palacial 120 square feet of living space. Cute as a button, and not much bigger.
• Green Building—Tour Rita and Joan’s house, remodeled using salvaged and second use materials, energy efficient windows, ‘green’ building materials and a grid-tied solar array. This will be a great way to get new ideas for old house challenges.
• “Communitecture” (community design and integration)—Tour and discuss POD 49′s communal systems, and examine how these systems help create one spot called “HOME” for three separate households. Yes, it is possible to double or in this case, triple, your fun by learning new ways to share space.

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Improvising with Strangers: Playing with hands-on collaboration
Hosted by Gary Hirsch
Saturday, February 23, 2013 from 10:30 AM to 1:00 PM

Spend the afternoon with TEDxConcordiaUPortland 2013 speaker Gary Hirsch learning to improvise and co-create with people you probably just met. Improv is not only an entertaining and engaging art form, it also holds best practices for anyone who needs to collaborate better in their work and life, come and play with it. If this idea scares you, then you have an even better reason to show up.

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Coffee from Seed to Cup: Roastery Tour and Coffee Tasting
Hosted by Marcus Young of Central City Concern
Saturday, February 9, 2013, 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM

Coffee engages our senses and builds community, from the private intimacy of our first morning cup to socially meeting friends for coffee and gathering at coffeehouses. Coffee is also one of the world’s largest industries. Before coffee ever touches our cup it passes through hundreds of hands. Farmers, mill workers, exporters and importers, roasters, and baristas all impact the quality of the cup.

Join Central City Coffee to experience how coffee professionals evaluate coffee quality through cupping. Discover how coffee travels a supply chain more complex than any other food product, and how that complexity makes coffee an ideal agent for social impact in producing countries and specifically in Portland. See the inner operations of a coffee roasting plant and delve into the myriad ways quality is maintained from seed to cup.

All Day Action Breaks

• Join Oregon ArtBeat and Jolie Guillebeau for It’s Easier than Tying Your Shoes: How Anyone Can Draw (Yes, Even You). During this action break, we’ll teach you three simple tools to create drawings that will allow you to recreate what you see.
  Located in Room 314 of the Library (3rd Floor)
• Grab a friend and visit the OPB Public Insight Network Story Booth to record your own story of change. Stories from the conference will be compiled online, and some may even end up on the radio waves of OPB!
  Located on 2nd Floor Mezzanine of the Library
• Join Mohammad Khan Kharoti in connecting Afghanistan and the United States through letter writing to promote cultural understanding! Mohammad will deliver these letters to the students and they will have the opportunity to write back to our collective TEDxConcordiaUPortland community!
  Located in the Library Lobby

First Break Only

• Hosted by Marcus Young and Central City Concern Coffee, join some of Portland’s finest baristas to learn about hand brewing coffee following coffee industry best-practices. Those completing this Action Break will have the arsenal to brew amazing coffee.
  Located in the Library Lobby
• Join TEDx partner and design team Band for a bike race where you don’t actually go anywhere. They set up a series of heats for you to test your endurance against your TEDx peers.
  Located on the Campus Green Outside the Library
• Gary Hirsch will host a co-creation station where you can finish the “assignment” that he will give at the end of his talk. He’ll also be on hand to facilitate some spontaneous improv and other co-creative experiences.
  Located on 2nd Floor Mezzanine of the Library

Second Break Only

• A People’s Choir invites you to come sing a complete set of Velocity-inspired pop songs with them during the afternoon Action Break. Use your voice to create community with your fellow TEDx attendees. No singing experience required.
  Located on the Campus Green Outside the Library
• What if you could take recyclable plastic material from a post-consumer waste stream and use it to build an attractive, thriving organic produce garden? Come share in the vision of a group of Concordia University MBA alumni as they seek to change the world, one garden at a time!
  Located on the Campus Green Outside the Library

If you’re joining us this Saturday, which ones will you choose?

At TEDxConcordiaUPortland Becoming Extraordinary 2012, speaker Joe Smith delivered his idea worth spreading about how to properly use a single paper towel. When asked why, out of all of the subjects he could have talked about, he chose to talk about paper towels, he had two more words:

“Why not?”

But then he went on:

“I realize that last answer is too flip. First, over the years I really have, as I’ve observed people using multiple towels to dry their hands—and out of my environmentalist leanings—developed something of a fixation on it; I see it as one way to make a difference. Second, while that difference in the overall scheme of things is pretty small, it provides a very good example for what’s needed if we are to avoid the environmental cliff: lots of people doing lots of little things can, when taken together, make a big difference. Third, I thought it would be fun for the viewers. And finally, given four minutes, I knew it was a message that could be effectively shared.”

A couple of weeks later, Joe’s talk was posted on TED.com where it currently has 1,200,000 hits and counting. People are now watching it everywhere TED talks can be seen, from Munich to Pakistan to Vancouver, BC. The idea is spreading so much in fact that the next time you talk about TED, your conversation may turn to Joe: “Oh yeah,” someone might say, “I saw that one about the paper towels.”

A small percentage of TEDx talks (less than 1%) actually make it to the parent TED.com collection, so this in itself is remarkable; however, Joe’s shaking and folding didn’t stop there.

An ad agency representing a paper towel company contacted him about posting something on their blog; Southwest Airlines requested information about him for their magazine; another company sent him some small cloth samples meant to be carried in lieu of paper towels; and one man was so inspired that he contacted Joe about making stickers to put on paper towel dispensers worldwide.

Joe’s TEDxConcordiaUPortland talk is also being shown at other TEDx events around the world, and we’ll be showing it at our very own TEDxConcordiaUPortland 2013 event.

You might remember the end of Joe’s talk, when he hinted that he might return to the stage again for a lesson on conserving toilet paper. You’ll have to be there on March 23rd, 2013, to see if he makes good on that promise.

Formed out of nostalgia for communal singing, A People’s Choir was launched by Decoteau Wilkerson, Paige Reitz, and Adele Hauser in 2011 and now includes regular assistance by Poppy Miliken. Two years later, A People’s Choir has not only hosted monthly sing-a-longs at The Waypost, but also events at Portland State University’s Open Engagement, New York’s Art in Odd Places Festival and Last Thursdays on Alberta.

On this night, the three women have handed out lyric sheets filled with velocity-themed songs suggested via social media crowd sourcing. It truly feels like a choir of the people. We all start up the vocal vibrations in the back of the masses, but by Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again,” we’ve cast off any self-consciousness and are now singing, shimmying and shaking our hearts out.

Photo Credit: George Mihaly

Our initial group of 30 has multiplied during the intermission, and we’re packed in The Waypost like sardines. If you really try, maybe you can make your way to the bar for a drink… but you’d better sing on your way!

As the songs unsung dwindle and our list becomes thin, the energy is in the room continues to rise. How can I tell? Probably from all the broad smiles that permeate our ranks and garble crisp lyrics; or there’s someone ripping a sweet air guitar solo in a circle of groupies.

This ADVENTURE! was a comfortable feeling for the vocally inclined, but for those of us who are shy with our pipes, it was a welcome chance to indulge, with the support of many other melodies. What a great way to practice singing, suggest songs you like and meet like minded rock stars, and all through the (well organized) democratic process!

TEDxConcordiaUPortland ADVENTURES! are unique and intimate events, designed to offer our TEDx community unparalleled, behind-the scenes access to the people and places that make the local area so dynamic. Click here to learn more about TEDxConcordiaUPortland’s upcoming ADVENTURES!

Lisa Anderson

Lisa Anderson is a storyteller, adventure lover and a dress-up queen with an aspiration of becoming an eccentric Southern cat lady. She’s one of several storytellers who will be sharing write-ups, interviews, and perspectives on the many extraordinary people from our surrounding community.

Leaving behind the extraneous is one sentiment that has led to a burgeoning tiny house movement in Portland. That movement has largely been led by Dee Williams, founder of Portland Alternative Dwellings (PAD), which offers plans, consulting, and workshops to those interested in building their own tiny house. Dee’s talk at the 2011 TEDxConcordiaUPortland event, “Dream Big, Live Small,” makes one realize that living tiny isn’t just about downsizing one’s things, its about upsizing one’s connection to community, neighbors, friends and the outdoors.

TEDxConcordiaUPortland adventurers met with Dee to explore a tiny house, learn about building one, and understand what it’s really like to live in 105 sq. ft.

“We look at a little house and think mostly about the structure and the logistics of it,” Dee said. “It’s important not to forget to do the harder job, of being an anthropologist on ourselves, and learning why we really want to do this.”

Photo Credit: Leah Olson

At any one time, there were five or six adventurers poking around inside the tiny house. Despite its small size, it didn’t actually seem small. That’s because tiny houses are designed mindfully so that there is no “dead space.” The colors and the light lend themselves to an open feel. Although the home was smaller than most American garages, it felt anything but claustrophobic.

The idea of exponentially downsizing and (gasp!) not having a mortgage has drawn many in the Portland-area to build their own tiny houses.

“People are waking up to the idea that they could be happy with less,” explained Dee. “The pendulum has been swinging toward the other direction that ‘more is better,’ and now it seems to be swinging back to the middle. People are asking themselves: ‘What is enough?’”

That’s the ultimate question behind tiny house living: how much do you really need to be happy? Does your “stuff” fulfill you? Those questions filtered through the minds of TEDxConcordiaUPortland adventurers as they envisioned themselves perhaps living in their own tiny house.

Photo Credit: Hunter Brookshier

One of the Tiny House Tour Adventure attendees, Kate Goodnight from Portland, recently made the plunge and decided to build her own tiny house. She started thinking about it last summer and then stumbled across some of Dee’s videos. Kate recently bought the trailer bed, on top of which her house will be built. “It’s a creative challenge to figure out what is most essential to you,” said Kate. “Then you design the house in a way that encompasses those things in a way that works.”

For people like Kate and Dee and many others in the Northwest, less really is more. After shedding years of accumulated things and moving to a smaller space, priorities naturally shift: there is less focus on material gain and more focus on interpersonal gain.

“This lifestyle has put me on par with some of my deepest values, like wanting to connect with others,” said Dee. “My connection to nature, friends and community: everything has changed.”

TEDxConcordiaUPortland ADVENTURES! are unique and intimate events, designed to offer our TEDx community unparalleled, behind-the scenes access to the people and places that make the local area so dynamic. Click here to learn more about TEDxConcordiaUPortland’s upcoming ADVENTURES!

The room is mostly open, with no props or scripted lines. It’s obvious that there’s not going to be much to go off of –– no direction other than the invitations we extend to each other. But that’s why some of us are here: to face an idea that scares us.

Photo Credit: George Mihaly

Our fearless leaders from On Your Feet, a creative consultancy, kick off the “Improvising with Strangers” TEDxConcordiaUPortland Adventure, asking us to write down three things we love as fast as we can.

“Let go and trust yourself,” Gary Hirsch, co-founder of On Your Feet, says.

Panic and fear of speaking are relegated to the depths of everyone’s minds as Gary and Shelley Darcy, an improv writer and performer, act silly and talk about how fun it is. Finally, we’re letting loose and ready to improvise together.

Our anxiety melts further as we mill around the room, scheming up the businesses we could create combining the things we love with the things others love. We then classify ourselves into similar groups of interests, hometowns and shirt colors, learning all sorts of facts about even the people we knew before this morning.

There’s a palpable excitement –– bursts of laughter and burgeoning smiles –– in the room. By the second activity, the finance professor teaching MBA students next door asks us to simmer down and close the door.

Photo Credit: Hunter Brookshier

Who would think that by displacing yourself from your comfort zone and challenging yourself to contribute to, but not dominate a creative social situation, you would actually feel more energized about what you’re doing than if you simply did it yourself?

On Your Feet teaches improv as not only an entertaining and engaging art form, but as an opportunity to build better collaboration skills for work and play. Shelley says to embrace the saying, “I have no idea what’s going to happen, but it’s going to be great.”

After working at improvising and having to be quick on our feet (both mentally and literally), people are excited –– jazzed, even. By the end of the workshop, adventurers are exchanging business cards and numbers. Some even stay an extra 20 minutes for a final activity.

The Adventure has made us all the more intrigued by Gary’s March 23rd TEDx talk, and we won’t be surprised if he incorporates a bit of improv. One of our highly involved TEDx speakers, Gary is excited to share the joy of co-creation with attendees. We’ve learned from Gary and Shelley that improv is here to be our great emancipator, breaking tension, inspiring cooperation and stoking creativity.

“What would be really amazing and inspiring would be if each one of those 650 people grabbed someone next to them (so now we have pairs of 325) and they made something together,” Gary says of TEDxConcordiaUPortland March 23rd. “Something physical, a story, image, movie, art, slide show, started a micro business for a weekend… then shared these stories with everyone else too!”

TEDxConcordiaUPortland ADVENTURES! are unique and intimate events, designed to offer our TEDx community unparalleled, behind-the scenes access to the people and places that make the local area so dynamic. Click here to learn more about TEDxConcordiaUPortland’s upcoming ADVENTURES!

Lisa Anderson

Lisa Anderson is a storyteller, adventure lover and a dress-up queen with an aspiration of becoming an eccentric Southern cat lady. She’s one of several storytellers who will be sharing write-ups, interviews, and perspectives on the many extraordinary people from our surrounding community.

I also begin to wonder whether the caffeinated groundwork I laid was such a “good” idea. How much coffee is too much? I learn from one attendee that his stomach hurt after spending a day at last year’s Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) convention, and later, the leader of today’s adventure, Marcus Young of Central City Coffee, will tell us that he, in fact, admires decaf drinkers.

“They’re the real coffee lovers,” he says, “because they drink it only for the taste; they drink it without the pharmacological kick.”

Marcus from Central City Coffee
Photo Credit: Hunter Brookshier

On March 23rd you may meet Marcus, a TEDxConcordiaUPortland partner for two years running and our resident coffee expert. He’ll be hosting one of several action breaks during the day, and if you attend his action break you’ll learn how to brew coffee the “right way” at home. Marcus absolutely loves coffee, and on this adventure he helped fully immerse us in a world that, earlier that morning, I knew very little about.

Let’s start with taste. Among the substances you encounter daily, coffee might be among the most complex. The layers of flavor in an artfully roasted cup of coffee react with every tasting area on the tongue. Notes of citrus, flowers, grass, or earth might arise when you smell a cup of grounds, metamorphosing as you add hot water.

During the coffee “cupping,” we paid attention to all of this, first smelling then slurping the coffee. Though we were still learning, coffee professionals regularly cup new roasts and blends in order to arrive at the ideal taste.

When the cupping ended and I set down my tasting spoon for the last time, I arrive at one conclusion: coffee is an amazing beverage.

Photo Credit: Hunter Brookshier

Our adventurous “Velocity” blend was picked from sustainably grown plants in Guatemala and El Salvador, harvested cherry by cherry, processed, dried, shipped, roasted, blended, tasted, and finally delivered—with something to go wrong each step of the way—made me realize just how incredible and rare a “good” cup of coffee really is.

Yet taste isn’t everything. Central City Coffee and the supporter Portland Roasting Coffee also believe the complexity of coffee’s supply chain makes it a powerful instrument for social change. Together they transform the miraculous process of coffee into something more tangible—transferable job skills.

Central City Coffee supports Central City Concern, and provides job-training to Central City Concern’s clients with a focus on transferrable skills like packaging and production, customer service and support, and distribution of coffee.

Portland Roasting Coffee supports the enterprise by donating raw coffee, providing training support, and the use of their roasting facilities. Their way of doing business is “built on integrity and trust,” and the carbon neutral company has received numerous awards—they know what they’re doing.

I left that day with a precious bag of freshly roasted Central City Coffee, and the next morning I ground it up and poured 202 degree water over it, making sure all of the grounds got covered. After a few minutes, I cracked the surface of the grounds with a spoon, inhaled the aroma deeply, plunged the French press, and poured a cup. It still wasn’t quite the same as what I tasted at Central City Coffee’s TEDx Adventure, but it was good. Really good.

Click here to learn more about TEDxConcordiaUPortland’s upcoming ADVENTURES!

That’s why it’s no surprise that new young farmers like Tyler and Alicia Jones are having such success by not just growing and selling their crop, but by earning the respect and rousing the curiosity of people who want to be more connected to their food. Tyler, who will be a speaker at TEDxConcordiaUPortland 2013, farms full-time with his wife, Alicia, at their Afton Field Farm in Corvallis, Oregon. They raise pastured poultry (eggs, broilers and turkeys), oak savanna pork, and grass-fed beef and lamb using multi-species rotational grazing. What the farm yields is sold to individuals at the Corvallis Farmers Market and to buying clubs from Eugene to Portland.

Farming is an interesting profession for young people to choose nowadays, but the timing couldn’t be more prudent. Thanks to food journalists and academics like Michael Pollan, and to the vibrant foodie culture that surrounds Portland and other progressive hot spots, people are more interested in what it is that they’re eating, where it’s been grown, how it’s been grown, and how it got to wherever it is they’re buying it. The general consensus is that the fewer steps removed you are from your famer, the better. Some ways to remove links in the supply chain from crop to crumb are to shop at farmers markets or join a CSA (community supported agriculture) and get a regular share of produce from a farm near you.

There are more than 160 farmers markets statewide, so for farmers like Tyler, the hardest part isn’t finding a sustainable avenue to sell crops, but learning how to actually farm it in the first place. In 2002 Tyler was an apprentice on Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm in Virginia. What he brought back with him was the skill set necessary to set up an effective crop rotation with a multi-species system that is similar to Polyface Farm’s, as well as an invigorated sense of purpose and mission. “Acknowledging the delicately interconnected nature of food systems, we strive to minimize negative agricultural impact on land and health through integrated rotational grazing and foraging methods, organic and humane practices and focus on local markets,” says Tyler. “We are committed to challenge the raising of food in ways that are respectful to the soil, animals and local community.”

If there’s one thing about Portland’s culinary culture we can boast about, it’s that it embodies the feel of a much larger city in terms of variety, excellence and reverence for locality. The TEDxConcordiaUPortland planning team is especially thankful and excited that Tyler can find time away from the constant busy life at his farm and business to come to Portland and educate our attendees on his work and its importance for our foodie future.

That year, Jensine stood up to homophobic bullies in her conservative farming community. She joined the school newspaper, writing passionate commentary about ending war and having the right to love who you chose. She even conquered her worst fear: trying out for the school play. And she won the leading role.

Shortly after fulfilling her dream of acting, Jensine wrote and performed her own play. She then wrote a 200-page book about the anguish of falling in love when it wasn’t accepted by her community. Through her words, Jensine hoped others could avoid the isolation and pain she’d felt.

“I channeled my pain of feeling like an outsider into creative expression and haven’t stopped since,” Jensine says.

As a young journalist in Burma and the Amazon, Jensine was astonished how some of the most important global stories she discovered hardly received mention in the mass media. She was determined to give a new voice to these stories.

At age 28 and with no prior publishing experience, Jensine founded World Pulse, a media network devoted to bringing women a global voice. Through the power of interactive digital media, World Pulse has transformed from a magazine into a powerful social movement, connecting more than 50,000 women from 190 countries.

Most recently, Jensine launched a web 2.0 citizen journalism training program that empowers women journalists from some of the world’s most forgotten places.

“I have a burning, unquenchable hunger to know what the world will look like when women and girls experience freedom to live to their full potential,” Jensine says. “It’s what gets me up in the morning.”

She describes a perfect day as road tripping somewhere she’s never been and getting a little bit lost on an unexpected adventure. Curiosity is always what motivates Jensine, and she continues to dream of unleashing the creative human potential of women across the globe through the power of media.

After making it her job for nearly a decade to listen to women on the ground around the world, this year Jensine plans to step out of her comfort zone and grow her own voice, expressing her unique point of view on world events.

“I don’t feel a heavy burden of ‘responsibility’ but a silken cord of anticipation unceasingly tugging me forward into a fascinating future,” Jensine says.