Swimmers sure do know how to work a water metaphor.
The latest aquatic athlete to grace the YouTube channel of the TEDx organization is Katelyn Cabral: a student at Lucaya International School and a member of the Bahamas National Swim Team.
Cabral is an impressive individual. At 15-years old, she’s already competed in 4 CARIFTA Swimming Championships and the 2017 Commonwealth Youth Games. She’s the deputy secretary general of her school’s Model United Nations club, and the founding president of GirlUp Bahamas a United Nations advocacy and service club for adolescent girls, and the treasurer of Interact International. She holds an untarnished 4.0 GPA at one of her country’s top private schools, and acts in community stage productions.
Cabral is also bi-racial, and that’s the foundation for her talk at the TEDxYouth@GrandBahama event.
“She embraces her diversity and believes that all people should be proud of their differences, as ultimately it’s those differences that define you,” TEDx describes her speech. She shares the experience of overcoming social and emotional barriers as an atypical teenager in so many different ways, and how that’s helped her grow into the person she is today.
TED is a non-profit organization that hosts its major annual event every year where they welcome “big thinkers” to Vancouver, Canada to speak about “big ideas” on topics ranging from the original 3 main ideas (Technology, Education, and Design, or TED) to science, cultural, political, and academic topics.
TEDx events are independently run under the TED brand and are organized similarly to TED events in presentation, though they are generallly much smaller in scope. TEDxYouth events are a subset of these specifically geared for speakers in grades 7-12, with similarly-aged audiences.
This speech was recorded on March 6th, 2019