For over a week, Janet Derrick has rehearsed for her moment on stage for the eighth TEDxNaperville.
“We believe that food is a right, and not a privilege. We want to stop food waste and help end food insecurity by getting it to the hands of the people that need it most,” said Derrick during her rehearsal on stage.
“How do you design it in such a way that they will take away at least one or two key things away from it,” asked Derrick.
As the Vice President of Loaves & Fishes Community Services’ CARES Programs, Derrick was asked to share the non-profit’s story.
“Loaves & Fishes is really a marketplace it’s not a food bank and I really want her to share her idea,” said TEDxNaperville Founder Arthur Zards. “It’s not only for people in Naperville to have some pride that Naperville actually has some cutting-edge programs for food delivery, but I’d like to have another community, globally, see this talk and say ‘why can’t we do that?’ And that’s the whole nature of TEDxNaperville; it’s sharing these ideas that are worth spreading. And I want Lisle or somebody across the country saying ‘why don’t we take our food bank and transform it into a food market and take some of the ideas that Loaves and Fishes is doing,’ and they can do it for their own community.”
To bring those ideas beyond just our community, derrick will discuss how to combat a nationwide problem – food waste.
“One of the statistics we talk about in the talk is that 40 percent of the food in this country is wasted, so how do we change our food system so that we’re not wasting food and getting it to families that are hungry and need healthy access to food,” said Derrick. “So we’re hoping that people think about it and are much more thoughtful about what they do donate.”
It’s a fitting addition to this year’s TEDxNaperville theme – “Full Spectrum,” which proposes that we all need to live in more than a single-color world and open our eyes to the full spectrum.
“By taking your belief system and meshing it with somebody else’s and somebody here and somebody here, maybe some opinion that you don’t agree with, maybe one that you do agree with, but once you start putting those together and you twist and you pull and you mesh them you become full spectrum,” added Zards. “And you can change your perspective and you can change your belief systems. And that’s what we want to explore this year.”
Derrick will join 17 other notable speakers and performers on November 10 at The Yellow Box. If you can’t make it, TEDxNaperville will also be live streamed on the their website.
If you’re interested in sharing a story that’s worth spreading, you can go to tedxnaperville.com and apply to be a TEDx speaker for next year’s show.
Naperville News 17’s Christine Lena reports.
