Kelsey Randle: Invest to Create Your World at TEDxYouth@MileHigh (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Kelsey Randle’s TEDx Talk: Invest to Create Your World at TEDxYouth@MileHigh conference.

TRANSCRIPT:

We are all trying to figure ourselves out: Who are we? How do we fit into the world around us? And what are we going to do with the rest of our lives? Overall, our whole generation is asking this question.

We describe ourselves as alone, overworked, and lacking community and identity, but it doesn’t have to be this way. And I invite you as I speak to try these things on because everybody is feeling this way. So, it’s very easy to reach into your community and create what you’re craving, to create your identity, and to reach into the lives of others.

So, when I was in 8th grade, I was very awkward, very introverted, but I knew I wanted to do really big things in life. I just didn’t know how.

Luckily for me, I met a group of girls who knew exactly how to do this. It was a group focused around community, learning, and living really big in the world. Together, we put our funds together, and decided to work every other Sunday for 2 hours to give back to our community. We did this in the form of grant giving. So, we would pool our funds together, review these applications, and by the time I graduated high school, I have been giving for 5 years.

There’s 55 other girls who joined the small group of girls with me, and it was the best place I could have been in that time of my life. And that’s where I started to find exactly who I was. So, fast forward, and I’m in college I’m lucky enough to meet a big group of people who are doing textbook fundraising. So, textbook fundraising is the idea where you get groups to donate books to you.

If a book is over $10, we sell it online. If it’s under $10, we donate it back to the students. In 3 years, we were able to donate $15,000. And this $15,000 went on to give money to children who had been abused and needed counseling. It gave backpacks to children who had never had backpacks to go back to school.