Speakers have been selected for TEDxMountain Ave’s 2024 spring annual event, which will be held Wednesday, May 1, at Poudre High School, 201 Impala Drive, Fort Collins. Speakers will share their unique voices on this year’s theme: Flourish. This will be the third time the TEDxMountain Ave leadership team has coordinated and hosted the event.
Tickets go on sale Friday, March 1. You can sign up for a one-time reminder here.
Introducing the 2024 TEDxMountain Ave speakers:
Chrissy Chard
Chrissy Chard finds that when kids do something wrong they don’t gravitate towards telling parents or guardians. Instead, they think “I can’t let them know”. As a mother of three kids, a family coach, and a researcher who works with teenagers, Chard wants to create households where kids don’t “get in trouble” as the foundation for healthy adult-child relationships. She wants to create environments that allow children to grow and develop without the fear of making inevitable mistakes.
Chard is the founder of Courageous Parents, a Colorado-based parent coaching practice and the director of the Regional Institute for Health and Environmental Leadership’s Advanced Leadership Training Program.
Gabrielle Judge
Gabrielle Judge is illustrating “lazy girl jobs”' as the solution to the disengaged employee problem; she argues for a new futuristic work style, which went viral worldwide when the phrase “lazy girl jobs” was created. What started as a TikTok trend has since blossomed into an ethos around work styles.
Judge is a content creator and CEO/Founder of Anti Work Girlboss, a social movement that represents the next generation of workplace. Her ideas have been featured on over 10,000 worldwide media mentions including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, New York Times, and 60 Minutes Australia.
Iris Radin
Iris Radin will share the dos and don’ts on how to have a good conversation in high school. She's noticed that many students don't know how to have a vulnerable conversation or how to validate difficult things. She'll share how students her age can have more positive and deep conversations to build better relationships.
Radin is a senior in the International Baccalaureate program at Poudre High School.
Kyrstin Askew
Kyrstin Askew will share her experiences on a challenging topic. As an anorexia patient five years in recovery, Askew wants to educate the world on eating disorders to remove the stigma and taboo surrounding the topic. She started the Eating Disorder Alliance (EDA) at her school and has been public speaking and presenting on the topic She hopes to promote growth through sharing her experience and knowledge.
Kyrstin Askew is a senior at Rocky Mountain High School and president of the EDA at RMHS.
Sonja Gedde
When assigned to her student teaching experience in the Midwest, Sonja Gedde was taken aback when her host teacher rejected her because of a nose piercing despite being a 4.0 college student, church youth leader and Miss North Dakota. She launched into studying presentation of the self and its impact on identity. Now two decades later and with a master's degree in communications and rhetoric, she'll share her story on living authentically, how we can embrace our identities and to “judge not lest ye be judged.”
Gedde is a high school administrator in Poudre School District and an affiliate professor at Colorado State University, teaching in the University Honors program and Communication Studies Department.
Susan Blanco
As chief judge of the Eighth Judicial District of Colorado (Larimer and Jackson counties), Susan Blanco feels that compassion is not often mixed with criminal law, but sometimes compassion is needed for humans to lead a better life. She believes the nation is facing a crisis with increased substance use, untreated/undiagnosed mental health needs, and homelessness and that people experiencing these issues often enter the criminal justice system with no resources to support and defend themselves.
Blanco is the founder of the First Competency Court of Colorado in Fort Collins. Through her work, people engage with services to help them exit the criminal justice system with more stability than when they entered.
Blanco, appointed to the bench in 2017, is the first female to serve as chief judge of the Eighth Judicial District of Colorado (Larimer and Jackson counties).
Thomas Lockridge
Thomas Lockridge is a trial lawyer who has been prosecuting felony cases for over 30 years. Through his work, he realized that in the courtroom whoever tells the best story wins. As a result, he dove into studying Hollywood screenwriting and its simplified structure for use in the courtroom and everyday life. He wants to show how important it is to find the heart of the story and universal values to make stories more impactful.
Lockridge served as the elected commonwealth attorney for the 13th Judicial Circuit in Kentucky for more than 26 years and has over 30 years-experience as a violent crime prosecutor.
TEDxMountain Ave is independently operated by a collaboration of students and educators in Poudre School District and the Fort Collins area. TEDxMountain Ave promotes workforce skills development, relationship building and hands-on leadership experience with a focus on youth empowerment.
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About TEDx, x = independently organized event
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TED Talks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized (subject to certain rules and regulations).
About TED
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, often in the form of short talks delivered by leading thinkers and doers. Many of these talks are given at TED Conferences, intimate TED Salons and thousands of independently organized TEDx events around the world. Videos of these talks are made available, free, on TED.com and other platforms. Audio versions of TED Talks are published to TED Talks Daily, available on all podcast platforms.
For media inquiries, please contact: Stephanie Mosnik, event organizer and technical director, at smosnik@psdschools.org or tedxmountainave@gmail.com.