Welcome back readers! Hopefully everyone managed to perform their civic duty on November 6th’s elections! Here at TEDxOhioStateUniversity, we hold PR booths throughout the year so the OSU community can hear the local ideas worth spreading. As a proud member of the PR committee, I can easily say that our booths are worth visiting! We’ve had two official booths this season. One for each our main event Fuse and our salon event Nourish.
Our first booth primarily focused on Fuse — the theme of our spring event. We wanted to visually portray how the Ohio State community is a fusion of individuals from different communities. The Ohio State community should grow to represent a larger variety of identities, but it’s important to see how diverse the community already is in order for the level of diversity to grow.
Living the college experience at such a huge campus is quite overwhelming. It’s easy to fall into the paradigm that you are not apart of any community here on campus. You may even feel the pressures of feeling that you’re the only representative of your community in this vast network of cultures. On Tuesday’s PR booth, we had roamers of the Union place a pin over the community in which they came from — to pinpoint a location; to show that it is being represented here in the university’s social sphere. This provided visitors of our booth a chance to not only interact with the awesome TEDxOhioStateUniversity members, but also a chance to understand their place in the campus culture. They can leave their mark on our board, build connections with our members, and learn about what TEDxOhioStateUniversity can offer to enhance their buckeye experience.
Through this PR booth, we learned that the Ohio State community is home to individuals who come from various parts of the globe. The community truly is a conglomerate of identities who each have their own intersectionalities. Each person’s identity offers important cultures and insights to the community which heightens the cultural impact our community can offer. Each person is an emblem of their chosen community, and this activity portrayed how beautiful the conglomerate of identities is. We learn new things about identity, intersectionality, culture, and way of life through each other. At our booth, we got to meet incredible individuals from various background, who each offered something inspiring to our campus culture.
The Fuse booth set the stage for our other booths to thrive. Our Nourish booth was just as much of a success. The Nourish booth was held in front of the RPAC on November 2nd. The Nourish event provides a platform for ideas such as food sustainability and nourishment of the soul and mind. We wanted our booth to echo the theme of Nourish, so we gave out flyers and granola bars to passersby of the RPAC. Though our Nourish booth didn’t provide a deep insight of our community, it still allowed us to generate an audience for our first ever salon event: Nourish.
Nourish tackles deep-rooted issues that are apparent in our own communities such as food sustainability and food security. According to The Ohio State University College of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, 1 in 4 Ohio children live in food-insecure households. The security and sustainability of food in our households determines our success in society. Nobody can conquer their day with an empty stomach, and that high percentage of children living in a food-insecure household is terrifying. This statistic is one of the many reasons why Nourish is the topic of our first inaugural Salon event. The format of the event is flexible and intimate which allows for the heavy topics to be well discussed within the event.
Food sustainability and security is also an issue on campus. A lot of our peers don’t know when or where their going to have their next meal. It’s important to discuss issues that not only occur in our state but also in our campus. Though the audience for Nourish will be much more intimate — it will allow the audience to digest the deep-rooted issues. The importance of these talks is to birth conversations. These heavy topics need to be digested and discussed in order for any change to occur. Perhaps, TEDxOhioStateUniversitySalon: Nourish can the starting point to your discussion on this important topic.
Nourish is the first TEDxOhioStateUniversitySalon event EVER. The salon events are free, so if you want to get a taste of what TEDxOhioStateUniversity is about, come to Nourish November 13th in Houston House 1874 Room.