TEDxSalem

Ideas worth spreading

Sarah Evans

Transformation through Awareness: Meet chiropractor & yoga teacher Zohra Campbell

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It’s hap­pened to all of us. We’re lis­ten­ing to a lec­ture or read­ing a book, but we’re not real­ly pay­ing atten­tion — our minds have wan­dered off to some­thing else.

At a day full of pre­sen­ta­tions and new ideas, like TEDxSalem, we can eas­i­ly find our­selves strug­gling with focus.

That’s where Dr. Zohra Camp­bell will try to help.

The long-time Salem chi­ro­prac­tor and yoga teacher will lead two ses­sions — one in the morn­ing and one after lunch — of mind­ful­ness and pranaya­ma, yog­ic breath­ing prac­tices that help our mind get focused, present, and aware.

She’ll be ask­ing audi­ence mem­bers to breathe, move, and become more aware of their bod­ies and sur­round­ings.

“My hope is that I can help us focus on what we are here for, notice what we bring to the table that day, and let our old pat­terns go so we can be present and open to the day ahead,” Camp­bell says.

Camp­bell believes that aware­ness is trans­for­ma­tion, and that is the heart of the busi­ness she has run for 15 years, Indi­go Well­ness Cen­ter.

A chi­ro­prac­tor since 1992, Camp­bell has found that her clients’ pain is often relat­ed to stress or ten­sion pat­terns they hold in their bod­ies.

“Pos­tur­al habits, emo­tion­al habits, men­tal habits — they keep us trapped in either pain or emo­tion­al suf­fer­ing,” she says. “My pas­sion is to help peo­ple unwind that.

“I start every yoga class by hav­ing peo­ple sit and breathe and just notice what they’re com­ing with today. Once we’re aware that we hold ten­sion in our neck, every time we have that aware­ness, we have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to respond.”

Indi­go began in 2004 in a loca­tion on south Com­mer­cial Street.  After sev­er­al loca­tion changes and with the sup­port of many stu­dents and clients, Indi­go found a home in Pringle Park Plaza, down­town Salem, five years ago.

Today, the busi­ness includes four chi­ro­prac­tors, sev­en mas­sage ther­a­pists, a coun­selor, and a full yoga stu­dio with 23 class­es each week.

Camp­bell also leads a 200-hour yoga teacher cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram and sev­er­al yoga retreats annu­al­ly. She has led retreats in Cuba, Mex­i­co, Guatemala, Hawaii, Cos­ta Rica and Italy.

Many of the retreats include a ser­vice ele­ment. In April, Camp­bell will be co-lead­ing a trip with Mik­ki Trow­bridge to India, where par­tic­i­pants will raise funds for an orga­ni­za­tion that helps vic­tims of human traf­fick­ing.

No mat­ter where she is teach­ing, Camp­bell tries to bring par­tic­i­pants’ focus back to the per­son­al aware­ness that can lead to heal­ing.

“We all feel great after we go to a yoga class or get a mas­sage, and we all wish we could feel that way all the time,” she says. “That’s real­ly my goal: to give you the tools you need to feel that way more of the time. The more we’re aware of our habits, the more oppor­tu­ni­ty there is to change them.”

TEDxSalem VII

TEDxSalem VII is an all-day event fea­tur­ing talks, per­for­mances, refresh­ments, lunch and swag. It takes place from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sat­ur­day, Jan. 4, 2020, at the Salem Con­ven­tion Cen­ter. Click here for tick­ets.  Fol­low us on Face­book for the most up-to-date news from our com­mu­ni­ty, and check our web­site reg­u­lar­ly for new infor­ma­tion. You can also reach us at info@tedxsalem.com

TEDxSalem poet explores identity, female empowerment through words

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Poet. Col­lege stu­dent. Black woman. Hait­ian immi­grant. Adoptee.

These are just a few of Jolie Brownell’s many iden­ti­ties.

When the 20-year-old takes the stage at TEDxSalem, the audi­ence will hear her grap­ple with these iden­ti­ties through her poet­ry.

“I want to express through poet­ry my walks of life, the inter­sec­tions of my dif­fer­ent iden­ti­ties, and what that means to me and to soci­ety,” Brownell says.

Brownell, who grad­u­at­ed from Sun­set High School in Beaver­ton, is a sopho­more at Loy­ola Mary­mount Uni­ver­si­ty in Los Ange­les. She’s major­ing in women and gen­der stud­ies.

Her choice of major wouldn’t sur­prise any­one who knew her in high school.

By age 19, Brownell had already won awards for her blog, “Me Too Girl,” and she had self-pub­lished a book with the same title. The book is a col­lec­tion of mes­sages and poems on girl empow­er­ment.

She has giv­en speech­es on this top­ic to hun­dreds of women and girls in the Port­land area, and led work­shops in part­ner­ship with Girls Inc., I Am That Girl, Pro­duced By Her, and Chick­Tech.

Brownell is orig­i­nal­ly from Haiti, but a Port­land fam­i­ly adopt­ed her when she was 3.

She first became ded­i­cat­ed to female empow­er­ment issues when she was just 13.

“Like many young girls around that age, I was con­sumed with self-hatred, self-doubt, lack of con­fi­dence,” she says. “Dur­ing the sum­mer between mid­dle school and high school, I decid­ed to shift gears because I real­ized that I’m going to have this body, I’m going to be this per­son for the rest of my life. Do I want to spend the rest of my life hat­ing this per­son, or do I want to spend it try­ing to teach myself how to love myself?”

Her essays and jour­nal entries about self-dis­cov­ery even­tu­al­ly led to her blog and her book.

“I’ve always loved the pow­er behind words, and I want­ed to use my words to uplift and inspire oth­ers,” Brownell says.

Brownell hopes that TEDxSalem audi­ence mem­bers will expe­ri­ence that inspi­ra­tion dur­ing her per­for­mance. But, ulti­mate­ly, the work to improve self-con­fi­dence is an indi­vid­ual pur­suit, she says.

“I’m try­ing to encour­age and uplift women. But I can only do so much and then you must car­ry it; you must do the work, the final step of lov­ing your­self,” she says. “I encour­age the audi­ence to find the deep­er mean­ings in my work and what that means for them.”

For more infor­ma­tion about Jolie Brownell, check out her web­site at www.joliebrownell.com

TEDxSalem VII

TEDxSalem VII is an all-day event fea­tur­ing talks, per­for­mances, refresh­ments, lunch and swag. It takes place from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sat­ur­day, Jan. 4, 2020, at the Salem Con­ven­tion Cen­ter. Click here for tick­ets.  Fol­low us on Face­book for the most up-to-date news from our com­mu­ni­ty, and check our web­site reg­u­lar­ly for new infor­ma­tion. You can also reach us at info@tedxsalem.com

DeafBlind, but Definitely Not Disconnected

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Here’s what Jen­ny­Lynn Diet­rich would like you to know about her:

She’s tak­en ser­vice learn­ing trips to Guatemala and Ghana. She’s a choco­late snob who wouldn’t dare touch the gener­ic stuff. She’s engaged to be mar­ried next year. She loves to paint, draw, and per­form on the the­ater stage. And she’s pas­sion­ate about help­ing oth­ers, point­ing them toward the resources that could help them change their lives.

You might learn these things if you just ask her. But Diet­rich says peo­ple are often too afraid or intim­i­dat­ed by two of her more obvi­ous traits: she is deaf and blind.

One of the main points Diet­rich hopes to make in her TEDxSalem talk, enti­tled “Deaf­Blind: Blind but Not Blind,” is that peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties val­ue auton­o­my — they want to be seen as reg­u­lar pro­duc­tive mem­bers of soci­ety, just like those with­out dis­abil­i­ties.

“We don’t want people’s pity,” she says. “We just want to be accept­ed as equals.”

Born with a rare hered­i­tary con­di­tion called Stick­ler syn­drome, Diet­rich is ful­ly blind in her left eye and has lim­it­ed vision in her right. She’s also pro­found­ly deaf in her left ear, but she can hear a bit in her right with a hear­ing aid. Her pre­ferred method to com­mu­ni­cate is Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage. She also uses a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion called Pro­Tac­tile — devel­oped by the Deaf­Blind com­mu­ni­ty — that involves sign­ing on someone’s hand or using parts of their body to help give visu­al or emo­tion­al cues.

Dur­ing her ear­ly years grow­ing up in Okla­homa, Diet­rich attend­ed a main­stream school. It wasn’t until high school that she went to a state school for the deaf. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Stud­ies from Gal­laudet Uni­ver­si­ty in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

Ulti­mate­ly she moved to Seat­tle to work as a Case Man­ag­er at the Deaf­Blind Ser­vice Cen­ter. She helped oth­er Deaf­Blind peo­ple by pro­vid­ing ser­vices to make their lives eas­i­er — includ­ing advo­ca­cy, infor­ma­tion and refer­rals, edu­ca­tion, and out­reach — and she ulti­mate­ly dis­cov­ered she had a pas­sion for help­ing oth­ers.

One of the most use­ful resources Diet­rich found in Seat­tle was Sup­port Ser­vice Providers (SSPs) — sight­ed guides who pro­vide Deaf­Blind peo­ple with visu­al infor­ma­tion about their envi­ron­ment so that they can par­tic­i­pate in reg­u­lar main­stream activ­i­ties such as gro­cery shop­ping, read­ing mail, or bank­ing.

“When I moved to Ore­gon, it was a chal­lenge because there’s not an SSP pro­gram here for peo­ple like me to access,” she says. “I’ve been work­ing hard this year to get some­thing like that estab­lished here by reach­ing out to oth­er Deaf­Blind peo­ple in the com­mu­ni­ty and lead­ers in pub­lic ser­vice.”

Diet­rich came to the Willamette Val­ley to pur­sue grad­u­ate stud­ies at West­ern Ore­gon Uni­ver­si­ty. She is no longer a stu­dent there, but she is focus­ing her time on attempt­ing to devel­op sup­ports for Deaf­Blind peo­ple in the state. She is cur­rent­ly a facil­i­ta­tor for a non­prof­it called the Ore­gon Deaf­Blind Com­mu­ni­ty Alliance Net­work, some­thing she hopes will become a larg­er statewide orga­ni­za­tion to help pro­vide resources to those who need it.

Advo­ca­cy would be a crit­i­cal part of their work — to help the gen­er­al pub­lic look beyond their dis­abil­i­ties and learn about their inter­ests, their per­son­al­i­ties, and their goals.

“Instead of watch­ing us in fear from afar,” she says, “be brave, and come and learn from us by engag­ing with us!”

TEDxSalem VI

TEDxSalem VI is an all-day event fea­tur­ing talks, per­for­mances, refresh­ments, lunch and a swag bag. It runs 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sat­ur­day, Jan. 5 at the Salem Con­ven­tion Cen­ter. Tick­ets are on sale now for $55, $45 for stu­dents. Fol­low us on Face­book for the most up-to-date news from our com­mu­ni­ty, and check our web­site reg­u­lar­ly for new infor­ma­tion. You can also reach us at info@tedxsalem.com.

TEDxSalem speaker starts her own college

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Michelle Jones thought traditional colleges were broken — so she started her own.

The U.S. high­er edu­ca­tion sys­tem has become a punch­ing bag in recent years — with tuition climb­ing, stu­dents tak­ing on enor­mous debt and grad­u­ates who still don’t know what to do with their lives. Prospec­tive stu­dents now judge col­leges not on what they will learn but on whether they will get a job.

Despite all the crit­i­cism, few are com­ing up with valid alter­na­tives, said Jones, a long­time pro­fes­sor and one of 12 fea­tured speak­ers at TEDxSalem VI Jan. 5.

“Most peo­ple in high­er edu­ca­tion agree that it’s bro­ken and we need oth­er options,” she says, “they just don’t know how to go about doing it.”

Jones describes the whole sys­tem — where stu­dents pick a col­lege, then choose a major, then fig­ure out what they’re going to do, then try it out — as “back­wards.” So, in 2016, she did some­thing extreme: she start­ed her own col­lege.

The result was Wayfind­ing Acad­e­my in Port­land, a two-year, non­prof­it, lib­er­al arts-focused col­lege where stu­dents can earn an asso­ciate of arts degree, sim­i­lar to a com­mu­ni­ty col­lege.

“We have fac­ul­ty, class­es, stu­dents, all those nor­mal things,” she says. “But none of it func­tions the way a tra­di­tion­al col­lege would func­tion.”

But let’s back up a bit. How does some­one even get the idea to start their own col­lege?

For Jones, it didn’t hap­pen until long after her own col­lege expe­ri­ence. After grad­u­at­ing high school, she did what every­one else did, she enrolled in a four-year col­lege. She earned a bachelor’s degree in two per­pet­u­al­ly pop­u­lar sub­jects, busi­ness and psy­chol­o­gy, at Trin­i­ty Uni­ver­si­ty in San Anto­nio, Texas.

Her men­tor intro­duced her to orga­ni­za­tion­al behav­ior, psy­chol­o­gy applied to the work­place set­ting. She became so inter­est­ed in the field that she went on to study it at Clare­mont Grad­u­ate Uni­ver­si­ty in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, earn­ing a master’s and a PhD.

From there, she start­ed teach­ing, work­ing at about five uni­ver­si­ties before becom­ing a fac­ul­ty mem­ber at Prov­i­dence Col­lege in Prov­i­dence, R.I. There, she co-taught an elec­tive called “We Don’t Need No Edu­ca­tion” where she chal­lenged stu­dents to con­sid­er what they would do dif­fer­ent­ly if they designed their own col­lege. The idea of rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing high­er edu­ca­tion nev­er left her, even when she moved to the North­west, where she ulti­mate­ly taught at Con­cor­dia Uni­ver­si­ty.

“I real­ized the whole sys­tem doesn’t real­ly work to the ben­e­fit of the stu­dent,” she says. “I would hear from many stu­dents who were angry, say­ing, ‘I’m in a lot of debt, I still don’t know what I want to do with my life, I’ve changed my major a bunch of times, and now it’s too late.’ The whole thing felt like a no-win sit­u­a­tion for them.”

Armed with her years of observ­ing col­leges from the inside, she gath­ered oth­er like-mind­ed pro­fes­sion­als who want­ed to change the sys­tem, set up a cam­pus and cur­ricu­lum, raised mon­ey, and made sure the school was an approved degree-grant­i­ng orga­ni­za­tion with Oregon’s High­er Edu­ca­tion Coor­di­nat­ing Com­mis­sion.

The acad­e­my grad­u­at­ed its first class in 2018. But what was so dif­fer­ent about their expe­ri­ence ver­sus a more tra­di­tion­al col­lege? And did their time at Wayfind­ing serve them well?

For those details, you’ll have to attend Jones’s talk. She promis­es a few sur­pris­es that might upend what you think is true about col­leges, and a thought-pro­vok­ing look at how serv­ing stu­dents bet­ter can impact our cul­ture and com­mu­ni­ties.

“Ore­gon has a long his­to­ry of being on the lead­ing edge of things — we had the first bot­tle bill, we were the first state to have vot­ing by mail, we were the first ‘death with dig­ni­ty’ state,” she says.

“We are now the first to cre­ate an alter­na­tive mod­el of high­er edu­ca­tion.”

TEDxSalem VI

TEDxSalem VI is an all-day event fea­tur­ing talks, per­for­mances, refresh­ments, lunch and a swag bag. It runs 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sat­ur­day, Jan. 5 at the Salem Con­ven­tion Cen­ter. Tick­ets are on sale now for $55, $45 for stu­dents. Fol­low us on Face­book for the most up-to-date news from our com­mu­ni­ty, and check our web­site reg­u­lar­ly for new infor­ma­tion. You can also reach us at info@tedxsalem.com.