A Bloomington-Normal tradition is returning for another year, but at a new location and with a larger list of speakers.
TEDxNormal will take the stage at the Astroth Community Education Center at Heartland Community College from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on April 20.
The event has been held in Normal nearly every year since its beginning in 2015.
This year’s theme is “Making Change” and explores “being a work in progress,” according to event curator Kate Herald Browne.
“Innovations that happen all the time, they’re not just a one and done situation,” Herald Browne said in an interview on WGLT’s Sound Ideas. “They evolve over time, they’re iterative, things build. So the theme ‘Making Change’ means it’s in progress. It’s not ‘Made a Change’ or ‘We Have Made Change.’ We’re in the process. We encourage our speakers to come up with big ideas and talks that revolve around what happens as a work in progress.”
This year's event will feature 10 speakers, talking about topics ranging from labor protest music, AI, and why Bloomington-Normal is the best place to survive a zombie apocalypse. The variety in topics is meant to show how diverse the community is, said Herald Browne.
"That sense of community is not just, this is who we are as individuals,” she said, “but we have a lot of different people working on a lot of different things and that mix of interests and ideas is what I think builds that community.”
The event has previously been held at the Normal Theater as well as Illinois State’s Center for Performing Arts. This is the first time it will be at Heartland. Herald Browne said event organizers had been looking at Heartland as a potential site before this year.
“We wanted to be at Heartland for a while,” she said, “because of the focus on technology and innovation, it’s a regional leader for a lot of workplace development.”
Herald Browne said TEDxNormal would like to go beyond TED talks and have its volunteers host workforce development workshops in areas such as resume writing and leadership training.
Tickets for the event are available at tedxnormal.net.
