We dropped off all 413 Parliamentarian invitations this morning. Paul Dewar’s office has been a strong support for pushing through with disseminating TEDxKids information to Parliamentarians. Specifically, in order to have all Parliamentarians receive TEDxKids invitations on the same day, we needed to send the invitations through Parliament’s internal mailing system. The Hill’s internal mailing system requires a Parliamentarian, in this case, Paul Dewar, to draft a letter requesting the delivery of 413 invitations.
The mail personnel were perplexed with the mound of cardboard invitations we brought in. Their faces were either stamped with confusion or quiet intrigue. One supervisor tried to convince me they “were not invitations”. I casually reminded her despite our tendency to see an invitation as having a standard format, we ran workshops with kids and gave them unfettered ability to create a cardboard invitation of their liking. To some kids this meant a 3D diorama, and to others, it meant a tiny drawing with an accompanying poem about “what they think the world would look like if it was run by kids.”
She protested saying, in her thirty plus years of working at Parliament Hill, they have never been asked to send out 413 cardboard invitations to each individual Senator and MP. I gently reminded her that despite our creativity hastily weaning with time, kids’ boundless creativity came up with what we have before us, and I hope we will not deprive the leaders of our country from experiencing 413 different visions of the world based on invitation semantics. In writing this comes across as firm and serious. It is worth noting, this entire dialogue took place hovering over heaps of cardboard. A situation continually reminding me of our unconventional approach in an environment renown for convention. All of which left me describing the above with intermittent giggles.
After a bit of banter, the leading mail room lady seemed to warm up to the cardboard invitation idea. I received an email later that day from Team Dewar confirming the invitations were sent out. TEDxKids @TheHill Parliamentarian invitations step two complete (step one being the creation of the inviations). We’re looking forward to seeing which of our country’s leaders choose to support our ideas and actions worth spreading.
