UCLA Anderson TED Week: The Power of Storytelling to Bridge Cultures and Generations

Photo: James Duncan Davidson/TED

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By Claudia Varney

TED Week at Anderson’s final day of presentations kicked off with a panel on life stories. Radio producer and StoryCorps founder Dave Isay discussed his mission to capture the stories of everyday people, and his vision to make crowdsourcing of storytelling possible through StoryCorps’ smartphone app, a TED Prize winner. He began this work when he interviewed people who had participated in the 1969 Stonewall Riots, and he found that his understanding of the lives of the LGBTQ community was fundamentally changed.

Isay’s narrative created a kaleidoscope of emotions through a range of moving conversations, including those between a mother and her son with Asperger’s, a reformed gang member and the mother of a man he killed, and a transgender woman talking to her daughter about her transition. Isay founded StoryCorps to encourage the use of storytelling to bridge people of different backgrounds for greater shared understanding. He dares to envision StoryCorps’ archive and use growing to the point where entire generations are encouraged to interview an elder in their community and learn their histories.

The Anderson panelists elaborated on their own roles in using storytelling to foster social change and mutual understanding. Emily Verellen, who is the senior director of programs at the Fledgling Fund, talked about her experiences working in Kenya at the Binti Pomoja Center, a women’s rights and reproductive health center in Nairobi, Kenya, where she worked on a book featuring the stories and life experiences of the girls at the center. Through documenting and relaying their stories to an international audience, she realized the effect it had on the girls to have an audience for their stories, as well as the double effect of raising international awareness and scholarship money for the participants.

Stosh Mintek, executive director of the Ghetto Film School in Los Angeles, lamented the shortfalls of our modern education system in developing creative thinkers and emphasized the need to encourage students to become storytellers in both their art and in their lives. The Ghetto Film School caters to high school students from diverse backgrounds and aims to educate and develop the next generation of storytellers. Through his work there, Mintek strives to be a part of the solution to the lack of inclusivity in the entertainment industry by using storytelling as a conduit to engage youth from underserved communities.

The third panelist, Adam Kalesperis, co-founder of B.R.I.D.G.E Theater Project, talked about his work in facilitating acting and performance programs that take place across the globe. He emphasized the importance of giving students someone to listen to their stories, drawing from his experiences growing up and writing short stories for a teacher who would read them.

The panelists inspired the audience at UCLA Anderson TED Week by relaying the diverse potential of storytelling as a catalyst for raising awareness of global problems, bringing people together and bridging both cultures and generations.

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This year's TED conference convened in Vancouver, Canada, under the theme Truth and Dare. The fourth annual TED Week at Anderson brings together the UCLA community to share ideas that change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world.

Check out the UCLA Anderson TED Week schedule

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