Words are too few to express my #gratitude and #euphoria in this moment. 📝 What started as a "dream" and a "I wonder IF I can______..." turned out to be a WOW that was awesome. SO, I ran into Wali (a mentor of mine locally) recently at the Maryland Innovation Center and he said: WALI: "bruh, if folks only knew, I remember you saying just last year, Yo, I wanna do a TED Talk event, and look at you just a year later, hosting one.." "thass HUGE Vondell, and you have NOOO IDEA, what this bout to do for everyone including yaself.."to go from a guy who used to be ON stages, to now, making stages available for others, thass huge!". #humbled, and what most don't see, is I started this from a place of isolation and being alone. ❤️ At 49, I had relocated to a new state, where I knew 2 people and was wondering how do I grow my MD real estate book of business and get involved and connect with my NEW MD community? I called my friend @Yolanda V, who lives in Nashville and said, 📱 "...we're gonna do a TED TALK event in Maryland..." And here we are. 🤪 40+ speaker invitations, 📁 22 applicants, and 🗣️ 10 speaker finalists later. These Core 🔟 as they call themselves, lol, will always be our inaugural family of TEDx Thunder Hill. 👏🏾 There will be more speakers, but never again a first cohort. 🤷🏾♂️ There were TONS of lessons learned, things I as the organizer GOT WRONG, boy oh boy, and a bunch of "woulda, shoulda, coulda's" -- but don't dwell on that Vondell. 🙌🏾 🕊️ THANK YOU Lord, that by your grace, mercy and steadfast love, the audience got value, the speakers were SHARP, and TALENTED and we came in just $230 shy of our budget - not bad for our first time out the gate with only 3 committee members!!! 👀 Read that again, we produced an entire TEDx event, with a committee of 3 volunteers + 1 community partner w/a FT admin and a 16 yr old intern. We were blessed to secure: 4 sponsors and 3-4 vendors and day of a team of 7-8 volunteers -- but this was a skeleton crew BY FAR.