I, ENGAGE.
I watch or sometimes listen to TED TALKS. A platform that brings individuals, mostly professionals from diverse walks of life to speak on different topics in their faculties. It runs under the slogan, Ideas worth spreading. It's on TED that I met Teresa Njoroge and got acquainted with her organization Clean Start which focuses on fighting for prison reforms. On TED TALK the renowned author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave her flawless speech on the dangers of a single story. You will learn how to master a new language in six months on Ted Talk or the self-love journey and what it teaches us. On Ted Talk, you will get doses of knowledge and inspiration.
Back home, we have ENGAGE TALK. The bi-monthly Engage platform focuses on the power of engagement to foster learning and transform minds and lives. Engage turns five this year and in its five-year tenure engage has presented to us speakers from different walks of life. The stories on Engage are personal. The stories move a nerve or sometimes in my case a tear. At Engage fascinating thinkers and doers combine to spark discussion and connection with the audience on a diverse mix of topics. Engage pushes one to understand the underrated importance of a man in his children's life. It brutally explains grief and its spontaneity. Engage gives a deep insight into what the sudden death of a loved one looks like. What a sudden demise of a loved one does to the people who stay. On Engage, survivors of domestic violence, divorce, drug addicts and those who’ve battled depression, grassy road accidents open up about their experiences and the change that comes with such.
“You were given that mountain to show people that it can move.”This is a common underlined statement as most of the speakers have in one way or the other moved mountains. It's not all doom and gloom on engage, no. We get 10-minute snippets to infertile women who finally conceived, divorcees who get a second chance to love or of women who have embraced their singlehood at ages which are mostly frowned upon. On Engage men who had otherwise been written off share their journies of how they not only stayed afloat but also made it past the finish line. We’ve even had a proposal on the Engage stage, can it get any better? She said yes, just in case you were wondering.
So on a normal Sunday, you will find me having my Engage marathon. Getting informed, inspired and very much influenced in the right way.