Theme: Find Us Here

Found by accident when inviting followers on social media, our theme Find Us Here is an invitation to connect to place, neighbours and communities. It is about the here and now, finding ourselves and the journey that brings us together.

TEDxPortobello was launched in 2015 in the seaside community of Portobello in Edinburgh. Run by a team of passionate volunteers, TEDxPortobello is inspired by the skills, passion, and ideas which exist in this area of Portobello. We aim to build a transformative experience alongside our volunteers, speakers, partners, audience members, and local community to inspire, nurture, and share good ideas, in the spirit of openness, inclusiveness, energy, and innovation.

19 Windsor Place
Edinburgh, Edinburgh, City of, EH15 2AJ
United Kingdom

Alex Humphry-Baker

User Experience Designer

Alex Humphry-Baker is a User Experience Designer completely engrossed in exploring how our actions in the digital space affect our physical world, and vice versa. She was recently awarded Young UX Designer of the Year and is still making the most of the “young” bit. Alex is also the organiser and host of CreativeMornings/Edinburgh – a monthly morning breakfast meetup for the Creative community.

Chris Hellawell

Founder of Edinburgh Tool Library

Chris Hellawell is the founder of the Edinburgh Tool Library, the only of it’s kind in the UK. He was inspired by visiting an established tool library in Toronto and wanted to translate what he saw to Scotland. Chris has an educational background in forestry and environmental science, but has focussed on charity work and employability provision in his professional career. He aspires to be a hybrid of David Bellamy and Tim Allen, but as any fan of science fiction knows, hybridisation nearly always ends in a monster!

Emma Jayne Park

Founding Director of Cultured Mongrel

Carrying the innate values of hip hop culture whilst exploring new territories in dance theatre, Emma Jayne Park makes socio-political performances with the intention of creating genuine dialogue. ‘High Octane… energetic, witty & playful’ (The Skinny), her practice asks audiences to engage through questioning their own social norms and their consequences. Founding her company, Cultured Mongrel, as a means for her practice to impact the sector beyond simply touring work, she actively explores people centred participation, developing methods of social innovation within the arts and reducing stigma as an Associate Artist with The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival.

Kenneth Hogg

Director for Local Government and Communities in the Scottish Government

Kenneth Hogg is Director for Local Government and Communities in the Scottish Government, where he leads work on public service reform and democratic renewal. Kenneth is particularly interested in bringing to life more participative approaches to government and public service, including enabling communities to have a greater say in changes about things that matter to them. In that spirit, in 2015 Kenneth led the introduction of U.Lab Scotland – a blended online/real world public participation platform focussed on leading change aligned with a sense of the emerging future. Kenneth has worked in public services for 25 years, and is a proud resident of Portobello.

Lauren Fox

Sculptor and art therapist

Lauren Fox is a sculptor and art therapist, inspired by the sea, by adventures had and adventures imagined, and by the deep waters of the people she encounters. Trained as a welder in a steel yard in Leith, Lauren uses her skills in metalwork to connect inner and outer worlds. She also works as an art therapist, building connections with people and helping them to make sense of their experiences. Lauren works between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and in her spare time she swims in the sea.

Megan Davey

Group Leader at The Roslin Institute

Megan Davey came to the UK at 18 to study Anatomy and Developmental Biology at UCL on their Pathfinder Programme, before she undertook a PhD in Developmental Biology at the University of Dundee. Megan discovered the TALPID3 mutation, the first ever chicken mutant identified and has recently shown that the TALPID3 gene is also important in human development. Megan is now a Group Leader at The Roslin Institute where she uses comparative avian anatomy and genomics to understand the fundamental rules of vertebrate embryonic development. Megan lives in Portobello with her two sons, where, like Darwin, they like hunting for sea-mice.

Mike Small

Editor of Bella Caledonia

Mike Small is the editor of Bella Caledonia and has written previously for the Guardian, Variant, Our Kingdom, and recently contributed essays to Despatches from the Invisible Revolution and Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence. He teaches at Torino University and researches on climate change and environmental justice. Current writing projects include – Radical Alba: a brief history of Scottish anarchism, direct action and free thinking 1880-2010 (AK Press), Patrick Geddes (biography), Towards an Ecological Scotland (with Douglas Strang), and A Bella Caledonia Anthology.

Thomas Lynch

Founding Director of Dad's Rock

Thomas Lynch is Edinburgh born, a qualified counsellor and HR manager, with over 20 years of experience of volunteering for the likes of Samaritans and The Red Cross. Thomas became passionate about fathers seven years ago when he and his wife had a son. Thomas looked for a dads organisation, couldn’t see any, and so he and a friend decided to start Dads Rock. Thomas tried to play the violin at school, and is now learning the guitar - he can just about play twinkle twinkle. He loves having adventures with his son, as well as reading new and well-loved stories together. In his spare time he blogs about the roller-coaster of being a dad.

Zakia Moulaoui

Founding Director, Invisible Edinburgh

Zakia Moulaoui is from France and has been living in Scotland for 8 years where she has worked with local and international charities, mostly organisations working with homeless people. After being the Director of International Partner Development at the Homeless World Cup Foundation, a global network of street soccer projects, she is now an International Development Consultant. She is also the Founder of Invisible Edinburgh, a Scottish social enterprise that trains local people who have experienced homelessness to become walking tour guides of their cities. They offer local and social tours, connecting tourists and locals with places that make the city what it is. Zakia wants to create change around the stigma surrounding homelessness worldwide and bring people together, no matter their backgrounds, stories or problems.