Hello! On behalf of the 2013 TEDxYouth@Toronto team, I’d like to welcome you to our first blog post for this year! My name is Sikandar Aftab, and along with Kateryna Shpir, we form this year’s Public Relations team. Through this blog, we hope to present a more personal side of this year’s team and all of the hard work and time that goes into producing this amazing event. We hope that you continue to follow this space as we embark towards our annual event on November 16!

So how does a team like ours come together? Shortly after our conference last November, our co-chairs Sabeen Saeed and Kelvin Lui set out to form a new committee for 2013. Through an online application process, they collected and interviewed countless candidates until forming a team which consisted of a mix of new faces and those who were also on board last year. We are excited (and relieved!) to have, by far, the largest team EVER this year to continue the growth of our event and accommodate our growing audience!

The TEDxYouth@Toronto team is divided into several sub-committees, namely.. *deep breath* Sponsorship, Marketing & Outreach, Speakers, Graphic Design, Web Development, Public Relations, and Social Media. We look forward to having each of these committees use this blog to introduce themselves and share their experiences with you over the course of the year.

This blog is ultimately for you, so we encourage you to ask questions and provide feedback on how we can improve the experience! This year’s theme, which will be discussed in detail in the next blog post, is “Discover ________.” While we hope that our event and our wonderful speakers will help you discover yourselves and the world around you, we hope that this blog will help you to discover us. So, keep us bookmarked and we will see you back here soon!