Kyle Kellams: Early next month, 10 speakers will hit the stage at the Fayetteville Public Library for the next iteration of TEDxFayetteville. The local franchise of the globally popular TED Talk series returns after a few years away.
Sammi Kennison is the organizer and licensee of TEDxFayetteville, and says she's been working toward getting the Saturday, Oct. 4, event together for some time.
Sammi Kennison: I started organizing TEDx events in probably about the fall of 2016 is when the ideas really started to get moving. I met with Brett Robinson, who was the previous licensee of TEDxFayetteville, and he was ready to help hand on and support us as we started it back up again and kept it going. Then the spring of 2017, we had TEDxDixonStreet. That was an event only for a capped 100 attendees based on the license requirements from TED.
Once we had that event, I was able to go to an actual TED conference — TED-hosted event — which qualified myself to be able to apply for a license to have any number of people. And then we did TEDxFayetteville the fall of 2018. We attempted to come back in the spring of 2020, and alas, that wasn’t going to happen. Didn’t happen. There were speakers invited, people prepped, ready to go, and we kept trying to push it and delay it, and eventually just had to pull the plug on the event altogether.
Here we are now, 2025, and bringing those speakers back to actually have their chance to give their talks.
Kellams: So this roster is the roster that more or less was ready to go in 2020.
Kennison: It was. So we had 13 people who were originally invited in 2020, and seven of them are on this roster right now. There are a couple of people who have moved into different roles, aren’t interested in giving a TED Talk anymore. We have one of our speakers who unfortunately passed away in between then and now, and our 2026 event, we’re actually going to have a talk honoring that speaker. So everybody here has had some connection to that 2020 event.
Kellams: You mentioned licensee. I think a lot of people don’t realize to host a TEDx event, you can’t just throw up letters that say TEDx.
Kennison: That’s correct. So TED has probably about a 60-page rule book that you have to follow. You fill out an application to TED.com and they review it. They see, are you a legitimate person? Do you want to help people? Are you a good steward of the brand? And then they grant you the license. You get the first one pretty easily and after that they do check to see. Did you do a good job? How did it go? And once you have a couple under your belt, then it goes a little bit faster to continue getting the license renewed.
Kellams: What can you tell me about what we’ll hear the seven people talk about?
Kennison: Oh yeah. So we’ll have 10 total speakers and seven of them, yes, seven from the first one from the 2020 event, and a couple more additional speakers that we’ve added to kind of fill out the roster for the day.
We’ve got one person who is an architect and in construction in Rogers. He actually won a contest from NASA to build a habitat on Mars. And he’s going to be talking us through that process and what happened.
We have another speaker who is going to be sharing a story about his grandfather, kind of achieving his second act, and how he became one of the first African American news reporters to deliver on cable news and broke some really, really key important stories in the ’60s and ’70s.
Kellams: Randy Wilburn, Yes. It’s fascinating.
Kennison: It’s going to be really, really exciting and really giving an encouragement to consider what your second act might be and that it’s never too late to get started on what your dreams might be.
We’ve got another speaker who is talking about the toxic culture of youth sports and what we can do to improve that.
Kellams: I like that. Yeah. I mean, not the toxic nature, but hear about it. How we’re going to improve it.
Kennison: We have another speaker having a pretty heavy topic about navigating the healthcare system as somebody who’s transgender and then facing a cancer diagnosis in the middle of that, and just their journey and story and what people can do to help support in your own life, even if you don’t know this person.
Kellams: So those are fascinating. And that’s just 40 percent.
Kennison: That’s right.
Kellams: Sixty-page book of how to do it. You hear the TED Talks, you the committee, you the organizers beforehand. I mean, that’s one of the things that TED says is get it polished, go in front of the organizers, and they’ll help you out.
Kennison: That’s right. We work with our speakers to make sure that when they’re going to be fact-checked, that everything that they put up there, we want to be able to prove it’s not going to be something that is just made up on the spot. We also want to make sure that it is not just self-promotion. It’s not an opportunity to say, “Hi, I’m John Smith and buy my product.” It is really an opportunity to say, here is an idea that is worth spreading. Here’s something that I’ve unpacked. Sometimes that does involve a book or a product or a service, but it’s really how did you get there? Why is this a need? What can people do with it? It’s not meant to be your call to action is go buy my product. It’s more a learning environment to that. So we’re helping all of our speakers really make sure that they can deliver the best talk.
Kellams: Do you break it into a first half, the second half, with an intermission?
Kennison: Yep. There will be three sessions actually throughout the day, so we’ll have two in the morning, one in the afternoon.
Kellams: So you’ve been working with this for nine years?
Kennison: I have been.
Kellams: What keeps you engaged in getting other people on stage to help other people?
Kennison: I feel like everybody has an incredible story inside of them. And there are people whose stories need a platform, like a TEDx Talk, and having the opportunity to invite speakers to share their stories. My favorite speakers are sometimes the ones who say, “Who, me? I don’t know that I could give a TEDx Talk. Like really? My story?” Those ones end up being the diamond in the rough, that gem opportunity for them to share and impact others.
And I just get so much value, especially in this Northwest Arkansas community. We have people all over the world that actually try to pitch for TEDxFayetteville speakers, and it’s pretty strict. You have to be connected to the local community for our event. Other TEDx events might have other rules, and they’ll take people from all over the world, but we will not. We want somebody who is invested in our community, has a connection here, wants to help this area. And so I love getting to help people get that platform because other talks will then get posted on YouTube and on TED.com. They will end up with that global stage, not just the local stage.
Kellams: Some of the, I’ve looked at the list, and some of the people are experienced in communication. I don’t know if everybody is, and I wonder if there’s a little bit of nerves for some folks. I mean, you might be talking about something that’s very personal. You might be talking in front of the biggest crowd you’ve talked in front of before. Have you had any conversations about that?
Kennison: Oh, absolutely. I think for a lot of the speakers, even the ones who are more experienced, there’s something about having a TED Talk that kind of feels like a really good feather to put in your cap. Something to say I’ve done this. I’m a TEDx speaker now. So I think everybody carries a little bit of those nerves with them.
We try really hard to emphasize practice. All of our speakers have had to participate. At this point, they’ve done four different rehearsals and they’ll have, I think, two more between now and the event, really to make sure that they have had a lot of reps to get those nerves out. And yet, inevitably, there is something different about standing on that red carpet on the day of in front of 600 people to say, this is my idea. OK world, please don’t throw tomatoes at me now.
Kellams: Don’t bring tomatoes.
Kennison: No tomatoes allowed.
Kellams: How do you determine who will go first? Who will go fourth? Who will go 10th?
Kennison: That is a really good question, Kyle. I am actively working on that at the moment. And there’s part of it that we try to think about the energy of the day. One, I want to bring attendees along on a journey. There’s a little bit of a story you tell with the talks themselves. Also, inside each talk, I also don’t want to have one session that’s just really bring you down, make you cry, and then another session that feels wow, that was all light and fluffy. So we try to balance light, heavy. We try to balance, are there any things that can be grouped together that really tie a really good story? Besides that, you know, just doing the best we can.
Kellams: All right. So 2025 is coming up. But you mentioned 2026.
Kennison: I did mention ’26.
Kellams: So you’re already working on that.
Kennison: We are already working on that. We are hoping that at our 2025 event on Oct. 4, we will be able to announce the date to everybody. But if people are interested in speakers, because there always are people interested in being a TEDx speaker, they can also find that application on our website. They can go either nominate themselves or nominate somebody else. Who’s that person that you know that has the great story that you say, you know, “You really need to get on a stage. This story needs to be shared with the world.” Go nominate them. We would love to hear them and start exploring who’s going to be the next TEDxFayetteville speakers for ’26.
Kellams: Sammi Kennison with TEDxFayetteville. Thank you so much. And what do I say to an organizer? Do I say break a leg to you?
Kennison: Sure, I’ll take break a leg. I think that’s great. Break a leg. Thank you.
Narration: Sammi Kennison is the organizer and licensee of TEDxFayetteville. The 2025 event is from 9 until 5 Saturday, Oct. 4, at the Fayetteville Public Library. Tickets are $25, $15 for students. More information, a list of speakers, and details about the history of Fayetteville can be found at TEDxFayetteville.
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