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Empowerment is a great word. It’s positive, powerful and meaningful, and can be applied in a number of ways.  It’s the word that was on my mind earlier this month as I traveled back to New York from the TEDWomen conference in Washington DC.
There are many definitions of empowerment used both technically and in popular contexts.  The way I tend to loosely define it is the process of an influential person or group of people addressing and acting on issues important to them, which in turn fosters power that they can transfer to their own lives, their communities and their societies. In my opinion, the key words here are acting, influential and transfer.

Acting

What’s that old saying, ‘actions speak louder than words’?  The speaker line-up and many of the women attendees I spoke with are prime examples of just how true this is.  None of them could have achieved what they did without getting up off their laurels and being dedicated to making change. Halla Tomasdottir of Iceland recognized a philosophical gap in the way finance was being done in her country, and went on to form Audur Capital, “putting feminine values into finance.”
In the case of Tony Porter (yes, there were men as speakers, and they were all fantastic and necessary), his advised action for other men was to say no. With his organization, A Call To Men, he encourages men to “get out of their man box” – the one that creates pressure to treat women poorly and exert control over them – as a path to liberation.  His parting words? “Liberation for women can start with the liberation of us as men.”

Elizabeth Lesser kicked off a small initiative of her own by asking us all to get out of our comfort zone and “Take the Other to Lunch,” whereby we all invite someone we’ve identifies as having divergent views from ourselves and engage in conversation without judgment or intents of persuasion, and listen, listen, listen.

Influential

Likewise, in many cases, these woman had to get over hurdles – societal, governmental, personal – and their ability to gain the support of others was crucial, whether it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton driving forward State-level initiatives for the advancement of girls, or Annet Namayanja gaining the support of her village in Uganda to focus heavily on bean production, and putting women at the helm of the effort. As the President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf took the opportunity to focus her country’s efforts on education for girls. She, like many leaders, recognized she was in a position of influence, and leveraged it to better her society in ways she had identified as being effective and progressive.

Doctors, as well as mother and daughter, Hawa Abdi and Deqo Mohamed needed to gain influence when they started a refugee center for the women of Somali. Being up against societal and governmental backlash in an environment where women weren’t normally prioritized the way they were proposing made their jobs that much more difficult on a daily basis.  But they now house hundreds of women and children, offering them crucial medical care in an otherwise violent and certainly discouraging environment.

Transfer

Lastly, the beauty of a word like empowerment is that it’s multi-sided and transferable.  As part of the live audience of 500+, and the global audience of thousands, just by listening to the experiences of these powerful women and men left us feeling nothing short of empowered ourselves.
Elizabeth Lindsey, an Explorer for National Geographic, gave a poetic and emotion-filled account of her time with a tribe of navigators in Micronesia that would have moved even the most passive people amongst us.

Madeleine Albright, Former US Secretary of State, made excuses for any of us to support each other as women unacceptable, ending her dinner talk with probably the best quote of the conference: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” Try leaving and doing nothing after that.  Impossible.

It’s these types of conferences that drive the energy and connections that make big things happen. These are just a few of the talks from TEDWomen.  You can find a more complete rundown here and here, and you can also check out TED for most of their video footage. It’s well worth a few minutes of your day.

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Photo Credits: Flickr CC TEDxSingapore