Jewel A.Z. Rodgers

What could life be like if people weren’t trained to believe that lack of money made them inferior? If culture and collaboration were viewed as enough to not only rethink communities, but also invest and rebuild them? What if, just for a moment, we stopped telling ourselves that it costs too much to change our cities, and instead, simply asked, “How many people do we need to make this happen?”

As a North Omaha native, Jewel begs the notion that circumstances are ambiguous. As a scholar, speaker, designer, and urban strategist, she discovers and implements ways to use collective economics as means to discover how we can determine our own version of what we call, reality. Through research, civic engagement, and design theories, she works toward humanizing the power of collaboration to address economic problems that affect millions of people on a daily basis. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.