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IN KC
OVERHEARD I’m SO over people asking me when I’m going to retire.”
Robin Steinberg of The Bail Project being interviewed by Tricia Bushnell of the Midwest Innocence Project at TEDxKC.
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What I Learned
itting at an all-day conference on a Saturday would not normally be something I’d race to sign up for. But TED conferences aren’t normal conferences. TEDxKC has long been one of the largest TEDx events in the world (yes, really). This year (the 10th anniversary), the organizers elected to pause the broader, general ideas TEDxKC event in favor of spotlighting its women’s and youth programming: TEDxKCWomen and TEDxYouth@KC. Friend Laura Welch invited me to become involved on the advisory committee for TEDxKCWomen over an afternoon of Champagne at her Weatherby Lake home after I’d long overstayed my welcome at a prior fundraising event. So, Saturday or not, I wasn’t about to miss—plus, the covetable tickets sold out in less than five minutes —yet another motivator. It was an afternoon full of Oprah-like aha! moments or as TED calls them, “ideas worth spreading.” Kansas City-based Natasha Kirsch described her successful solution of teaching a repeatable, living-wage, HOT family-flexible, and felGOSSIP: on-friendly career (spoiler alert: it’s The famed dog grooming) Palm Restaurant is reportedly aiming to break the to add Kansas City as cycle of genthe newest city on its erational povillustrious list of erty. Just over locations. two years into
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The Dog Grooming Project, 100 percent of Natasha’s graduates are employed and earning $40K+ per year. Laura Tempesta, the only person in North America with a master’s degree in lingerie, shattered pretty much everything you thought you knew about bra sizing (abstract for me—but completely fascinating). And one of my favorites, Robin Steinberg, CEO of The Bail Project, discussed solving a profound injustice in our legal system: those who can afford to pay bail go home (charges often ultimately dismissed), while those who can’t pay, whether innocent or guilty, must choose between sitting in jail until backlogged courts can hear their case—which can take months, or even years—or plead guilty to go home. Robin’s organization covers people’s bail, often less than a thousand dollars, to circumvent the cash bail system’s effective criminalization of poverty. Oh, and 96 percent of those whose bail is paid show up at court. The day closed out on a lighter note with an exuberant performance by Flor de Toloache, the Grammy-winning all-female mariachi ensemble. Day at a conference? No. More like a spa day for my brain and soul. SPOTTED: Mike Lundgren, Jeanette Prenger, Charles Bruffy, Suzanne & Stephen Limpic, Nicole Wang, Chris Hernandez, Paul Monteil, Amina Hood, Jennifer Lapfka, Godfrey Riddle, Vivien Jennings & Roger Doeren, Whitney Manney