Quick-strike talks help promote community
Economic Development Lethbridge, with support from RBC, brought 10 local speakers with innovative and inspirational stories to give a quick presentation on hard-hitting topics to inspire the audience with ideas on community building as part of the second Ignite YQL event Wednesday at the Enmax Centre.
The Ignite talks are short presentations intended to challenge the speaker in a fast-paced, high-energy presentation that lasts only five minutes. Presenters get 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds. This not only forces presenters to minimize and prioritize the points of their presentation, but to do it in a way that inspires the audience.
“This is our second year and basically we saw this format at another community event somewhere else and we thought that it would be really interesting to get a bunch of people together and get people excited about talking about our community,” said Trevor Lewington, chief executive officer of Economic Development Lethbridge.
“It is a chance to deliver a very quick message in five minutes, which is not always easy to do with complex topics such as the opioid crisis, to virtual reality in education. People have to find a way to deliver that in an impactful way, so the presenters get some great experience.”
Ignite topics included: putting the spotlight on equality in the workplace and in Parliament; building community after university; how local photography builds community; the future of learning with virtual reality; why Lethbridge is awesome; and investing over donating in your community.
A common theme for all the presentations was how does what they do or see help build community and how do we grow Lethbridge to be a better place. Peter Imhof, director at Family Services, spoke about the common community issue opioid epidemic, and the often overlooked approach which could help future epidemics.
“I wanted to emphasize and highlight something that is often overlooked, which is the prevention question of what can we do today to make sure that we don’t have another addiction epidemic in the future,” said Imhof. “The key thing is quite simple, and it is engaging and strengthening children who are experiencing traumatic events. They can be very damaging to how our brains work, and once we mess up our brains, it is a lot of work to bring that back in and then you are dealing with mental health and addiction issues. If we can support young children, that is where we can make the biggest impact.”
Imhof said the Ignite YQL format is engaging and a good way to direct his message to others who aren’t directly involved to the issue, rather opening up the conversation to businesses and citizens who are interested in the wellbeing of the community.
Ignite was an opportunity for local businesses and community members interested in learning more about Lethbridge and to make connections with others who were inspired to help the community.
“For the audience, in less than an hour you get to hear from powerful people and hear passionate stories that they are interested in and you walk away in a very short period of time with some hopefully great ideas and some new insights,” said Lewington. “We have people from the academic community, members of city council and business owners. It is creating opportunities for these interesting collisions of different people from different spaces in our community and open up conversation on a wide range of topics.”
EDL is not sure if it will bring Ignite YQL back for another year, but says they have inspired other businesses and organizations who are interesting in starting their own version of the event.