TEDxJacksonville will present its seventh annual local conference Oct. 20 at the Florida Theatre. A TEDx event is licensed by the global TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) nonprofit and organized by volunteers to generate community conversations and connections through brief, powerful talks. She and her husband, Gunster lawyer Asghar Syed, welcomed their first child, son Raza, on Valentine’s Day.
I was born in Pakistan, in Karachi. My family moved to New York when I was 9 years old. I grew up in Queens in the public school system. I went to grad school in England because I wanted to explore the world. I had more of a culture shock moving from New York to Jacksonville than I did from Pakistan to New York because New York is such a diverse place. I lived in (Washington) D.C. for an internship and then Jacksonville the last seven years.
I was a premed major and decided that wasn’t for me and then started traveling. I got my master’s in international development, but when I met Asghar, I discovered Jacksonville. I realized that what I wanted to do abroad could be done stateside, and nonprofits were a natural fit.
I started at the Girl Scouts of Gateway Council and with the PACE Center for Girls and then JAX Chamber. Rena Coughlin at the Nonprofit Center of Northeast Florida got me to join the Florida Nonprofit Alliance. It’s not really the trajectory I thought I was going to be taking but one that I’ve immensely enjoyed and is both professionally and personally rewarding.
TEDx is really cool for me because it allows us to curate what is best and most relatable for the local audience. We are following the guidelines and the branding regulations of TED, but we have full independence in how we curate our conference, who we invite to speak, and that’s been fun for me. I’ve been able to discover all these great people in Jacksonville who are doing phenomenal things and they just didn’t have a platform that elevated them to the global space.
At our conference, we record every talk, we record every performance, and then it gets uploaded to the TEDx YouTube channel and it’s available for the world to watch and for that individual to market as they see fit. Every year I discover something new that’s always an “aha” moment.
One of the things that’s important to me is travel. That’s something I insist we do. Before we got married, we both listed our individual goals and things that we liked as collective goals, and a couple for me is that we had to travel to a new place every year. I’m proud to say that we’ve been able to do that. It allows me to detach myself from commitments and responsibilities at home and immerse myself in where we’re going, and learn about that culture, the food and the local essence.
Within his first three weeks, we got Raza’s passport and the three of us are going to Israel in July. We want him to be adjusted to traveling. We both traveled as kids and we hope he enjoys it as much as we did.
Being a South Asian woman in Jacksonville, I always get a request to participate or be a part of something. I would challenge the community to ask me who else can we tap because often we elevate one or several individuals and it’s the same people. There are so many fantastic people in the community who need that same exposure. It’s important to elevate others.