#MeToo on agenda at TED Talks event
‘Time’s up on women Being responsible for men’s bad behaviour,’ TV star says
In the moment of #MeToo awareness about sexual harassment, American actor Tracee Ellis Ross offered two invitations to start making change to an audience at TED Talks Tuesday in Vancouver.
“Time’s up on women being responsible for men’s bad behaviour,” said Ellis Ross.
So to men in the audience, she invited them to become “allies as we work together toward change,” to be accountable, self-reflective and supportive of women in the effort to achieve equality.
To the women, Ellis Ross encouraged them to acknowledge the fury that they’ve had to suppress in lifetimes of being pushed aside, ignored or assaulted by men who have taken it for granted that they could treat them more like property.
“Culture is shifting, and it’s time,” she said.
Ellis Ross shared the stage with Parkland, Fla., history teacher Diane Wolk-Rogers, who delivered an emotional reflection on the need for gun control in America and virtual-reality evangelist Jaron Lanier on the opening day of the TED Talks 2018 conference in Vancouver.
The theme of this year’s TED Talks, is “the age of amazement,” which head executive Chris Anderson promised would be equal parts uncomfortable and hopeful.
The conference brings together about 1,500 well-off influencers and change-makers who pay a minimum of US$10,000 to support the event and help finance the web-based platform to freely distribute the conference’s content and its subsidiaries such as TED -X events.
“Ideas worth spreading,” is the subtitle to the overall TED effort and to open the conference Tuesday attendees heard ideas about making better vaccines for malaria, crowdfunding to build hospitals in war zones and citizen-based pollution monitoring to drive policies that improve air quality from its TED fellows.
Fellows are scientists, researchers and change-makers who receive direct assistance from TED in the form of coaching, mentoring and PR expertise to help further the work they are already doing.
Attendees on Tuesday heard from 26 fellows.
Parisian environmental entrepreneur Romain Lacombe talked about finding the same “tipping point” of public concern over air pollution that health officials did in second-hand smoke that helped widen bans on smoking in public places.
“Air pollution is a burning public-health crisis that kills seven million people every year and costs $5 trillion to the world economy,” said Lacombe, whose company, Plume Labs, is developing technology to network street-by-street air quality monitoring.
Plume makes mobile air monitors that individuals can carry and link to a database that distributes crowdsourced mapping through a smartphone app that is more detailed than usual government monitoring sources.
If citizens embrace such technology, Lacombe said, they would be able to make decisions such as picking times when pollution is low to exercise, pick the parks with cleaner air quality to take their children or push politicians to enact policies that reduce air pollution.
“Technology alone will not solve climate change, nor will it make air pollution disappear overnight,” Lacombe said.
“But we can make information about air quality more transparent and it can empower people to take action to improve their own health.”
On the theme of crowdsourcing, British- Syrian doctor Rola Hallam spoke of her experience starting the crowdfunding effort CanDo to match donations directly with the humanitarian group Independent Doctors Association to rebuild bombed hospitals in Syria.
In the process, Hallam said she discovered that humanitarian groups inside Syria were only getting 0.3 per cent of aid budgets for Syria although those groups, such as IDA, were in the best position to deliver life-saving medical care.
“Thousands of people came together to achieve (this goal) and we built the first crowdfunded hospital,” Hallam said, which an inspired IDA named Hospital Hope.
And Hallam offered the CanDo model as a way of matching donors with hospitals and aid efforts directly inside crisis zones around the world.
“The (aid) system needs to change and change starts with us,” Hallam said.