The 2025 TEDxDeerfield Event: “An Amplifier for Voices”

Albert Yuk/Deerfield Scroll

On February 23, speakers at the tenth annual TEDxDeerfield event took their ideas into flight around the theme of “The Butterfly Effect” in the Elizabeth Wachsman Concert Hall. The production spotlighted the messages and stories of eight Deerfield and external speakers. “I do believe in TEDx as an amplifier for voices,” Language Department Chair and TEDxDeerfield Organizer Dan Houston said. “It’s an opportunity to get a message out there.”

Compared to past programs that took place at night, the 2025 TEDx event sized down the audience and ran during the daytime. Dr. Houston said, “Our decision to make it a more contained and manageable event...made the student [organizers’] workload manageable.” The decision also lightened the load on catering for the event.

From promoting parental communication around disabilities to recalling a teenage daughter’s passing, many of this year’s presenters touched on awareness, advocacy, and emotionally challenging topics. Health Advocate Brigitte Cutshall, for example, drew on her experiences as a cancer survivor to expound on how humor empowers patients. She said, “I shared my experience with how—over 15 years of some crazy health issues—I’m still here, and that’s because of the small steps and being consistent.”

Kate Doerge, the CEO and co-founder of Penny’s Flight Foundation, launched her nonprofit in honor of her daughter Penny to raise awareness for neurofibromatosis, a rare genetic disorder involving the development of tumors. “My topic was how to find your purpose and how to affect people’s lives in the most wonderful and surprising ways,” Doerge explained. “What we have done in launching Penny’s Flight Foundation has really been turning our pain of losing our daughter into purpose.”

Doerge’s speech engaged with poignant and moving stories. She said, “I led with my heart...I had Penny with me. In planning it truly, I felt her with me. It resonated that a couple people in the audience were crying in rehearsal, so I knew that at least I was on the right path to delivering it.” In her speech titled “They CAN Handle the Truth: Why Children Should Know About Their Disability,” Reagan Warren ’27 explored her upbringing with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease and the cause-and-effect of withholding information from children about their disabilities. Warren said, “My parents told me about my disability, and when I found out that that isn’t a common way to go about raising a child with a disability, I thought it was going to be really important to get my message out there.”

This year’s organizing team—a committee made up of Avery Zakowich ’25, Hannah Horner ’25, Ellora Devitre ’26, Deerfield Production Services Technician Steven Dierks, and Dr. Houston—began preparations for the event in May of 2024 Dr. Houston commented on the smooth-running licensing and organizing process: “A lot of that had to do with Avery...she had a very clear vision for what she wanted to do, and she really got her act together and locked in early on.” In addition to advertising TEDxDeerfield and contracting Frontier Community Access Television to produce the event, the organizing team helped speakers edit their presentation drafts. “Dr. Houston...happens to be my hall resident, so I would stop by his office and just get tips on how I can improve,” Warren said. “And so it was just a continuous effort: read, revise, say it out loud, see what Doc [Dr. Houston] thinks, just make sure that I’m ready to go on Sunday.”

Cutshall agreed, saying, “I had some good feedback from the tech people...I couldn’t have done it without the people doing the filming. And then beforehand, I got some good feedback on the speech from Avery.”

The presenters resonated with the theme of “The Butterfly Effect” in different ways, with some external speakers travelling from other states to deliver their TED talk. “Deerfield had the Butterfly Effect [theme], and I thought it was really in line with my topic, which is about small changes,” Cutshall, who drove to Deerfield from Atlanta, explained. “People always talk about these massive changes. Well, that doesn’t help you in the long run. You have to stick with the smaller steps and the Butterfly Effect fits in with that.”

Doerge acknowledged how her nonprofit deeply aligned with the TEDx theme, saying, “When a friend had sent me that the TEDx theme was the Butterfly Effect this year, we all knew it seemed to be a sign because our foundation is all about spreading your wings and shining your light, and this idea of the butterfly effect, and how the simplest act, such as the flap of a butterfly’s wing, can cause a revolution. And we are causing a revolution.”

This year’s TEDx event was especially meaningful to Tene Ouedraogo ’25, who for the past two years, had helped set up microphones behind the scenes for the program. “I never thought there’d be a day that I would be on stage,” Ouedraogo explained. “But come my senior year...I recognized that this would be the last opportunity where I could partake in something as life changing as this. For me, TEDx talk is a bucket list item that not many people get to participate in.”

Each speaker hoped to not only share their stories but also strike a chord with the audience. Kathryn Sparrow, who presented her speech “The Art of Strategic Quitting: Redefining Quitting as a Strategy for Success” said, “I really wanted to be able to suss out a topic that I thought had meaning for people more than just myself.”

For Warren, that meaning came as a wakeup call to action. She said, “I really hope people take away the fact that—I actually said this in my speech—you cannot be a bystander in your child’s life. It’s really important to be able to nurture an environment where your child can grow up confident in themselves.”

Many speakers, organizers, and audience members appreciated how TEDx could amplify storytelling. Associate Editor Chelsea Shen ’27, whose speech examined the effects of labelling personalities, said, “This was a great opportunity, a really rare chance, to get up in a professional setting, a recording place, to give my talk and have that impact on a wide range of people.”

Doerge also valued the TEDx opportunity. She said, “TED is such an incredibly powerful platform. I’m so grateful for the opportunity to tell my story, and my hope is that people hear it and that they are inspired, and they, too, will do something that allows them to have a TED Talk.”

Reflecting on the event’s success, Dr. Houston expressed his respect for the speakers who took the stage that weekend. He said, “I’m really proud of those who came out to do this...doing it just out of either a desire to spread a message or out of their love of connecting with people.”