Ideas Festival Emory

Monica Motivates is a woman-owned business that provides executive coaching, speaking, and
consulting services. Our vision is focused on helping women and underrepresented founders secure
funding to scale their businesses.

Recognizing that female start ups only received 2.7% of the $136.5 billion total invested by venture
capital firms last year, our team became committed to closing the gap and helping women and
underrepresented founders effectively prepare to access the funding that is available to them. As a result, our team launched Pitch University, a comprehensive and interactive workshop, featuring strategies and tactics shared by current and former executives of multinational companies.

When J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, became the Republican nominee for Vice President, Appalachian culture and history were again thrust into the national conversation.
Although Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning 1976 documentary Harlan County USA is nearly fifty years old, it is now more relevant than ever. The film tells the story of a 13-month-long coal mine strike in Brookside, Kentucky.
On its release, Film Comment wrote:
"Few documentaries rivet you to your seat; this one does. The guts it took to make are up there on the screen, in the footage shot by director Barbara Kopple and cameraman Hart Perry during the violent encounters between scabs (mostly KKK members) and strikers. It is obvious that Kopple’s rapport with the miners’ wives was extremely close; the women all come through strongly, especially Lois Scott, the Jane Darwell earth mother of Harlan who totes a gun in her cleavage."
Barbara Kopple will join us for the screening and discuss making the film, its impact and relevance today.

Ever taken an aspirin? Thank a willow tree for that. Have a loved one who has fought cancer? Many of our most important cancer medicines originated in the yew tree, mayapple, and Madagascar periwinkle. Plants are the basis for a vast array of lifesaving and health-improving medicines we all now take for granted. Ethnobotanist Dr. Cassandra L. Quave shows us how important studying plants is while sharing her own incredible journey as told in her memoir The Plant Hunter: A Scientist’s Quest for Nature’s Next Medicines. She’ll be joined by the team from the Emory University Herbarium, which this year is celebrating 75 years of botanical research and education! We’ll have plant specimens on display and copies of The Plant Hunter available for sale and signings.

Elizabeth Engelhardt argues that modern American food, business, caretaking, politics, sex, travel, writing, and restaurants all owe a debt to boardinghouse women in the South. From the eighteenth century well into the twentieth, entrepreneurial women ran boardinghouses throughout the South; some also carried the institution to far-flung places like California, New York, and London. Owned and operated by Black, Jewish, Native American, and white women, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, these lodgings were often hubs of business innovation and engines of financial independence for their owners. Within their walls, boardinghouse residents and owners developed the region's earliest printed cookbooks, created space for making music and writing literary works, formed ad hoc communities of support, tested boundaries of race and sexuality, and more. Dr. Engelhardt will be in discussion with southern entrepreneur Stephanie Stuckey.

Covington Regional Ballet will perform More to Say, a contemporary dance performance that explores the passage of time, existence, and the human experience. Written by the young performers aged 11-17, the piece delves into life's mysteries and our place in the universe, offering a fresh perspective through the lens of youth. The choreography captures the balance between the vastness of the cosmos and the personal reflections of the dancers, weaving together themes of growing up, memories, and the search for meaning. By inviting the audience to reflect with a sense of nostalgia and wonder, the performance encourages a deeper appreciation for the fleeting moments that shape our lives and a renewed curiosity about the world.

More to Say was created by Jillian Mitchell, CRB's Creative Director and Resident Choreographer. Jillian trained at Harid Conservatory and Canada's Royal Winnipeg Ballet School and performed professionally with New Jersey Ballet, Rebecca Davis Dance, Roxey Ballet, Georgia Ballet, gloATL, Proia Dance Project, and The Atlanta Opera. In addition to working with CRB, Jillian is the founder of the celebrated Atlanta-based company Kit Modus and is currently on staff at The University of Georgia Dance Department.

The title, BE-SPOKEN, is a nod to the term ‘bespoke.’ The work uses sacred texts and music genres to address themes of Black empowerment, justice for police violence within Black and Brown communities, and hope for a more prosperous future. During the worldwide shutdown, violent atrocities committed upon the Black community were unavoidably visible. Our nation, once again, struggles to reconcile its original sin of slavery and its lasting institutionalized legacy, racism. BE-SPOKEN is a cantata that explores the themes of loss and joy, and celebrates Blackness. The work begins with a field song and moves through gospel, funk, and hip-hop. The text and music for the work was written by Emorja Roberson, Anthony T. Walker, Pamela Blair, and Chavis Gill (aka “King Chav”).

Chef Virginia Willis and writer Janisse Ray team up to talk not only about the nature of food and story, but about cultivating the ways we think about ourselves—how we return to authenticity, how we lighten up, how we ground, and how we tell the narratives of our lives.

Common Good Atlanta (CGA) began in 2008, with one Ph.D. student, Sarah Higinbotham, who felt called to volunteer to teach at a prison as a response to her uncle's incarceration. After writing fourteen Georgia prisons, Phillips State Prison finally accepted her offer to teach a course. That semester, Sarah provided all the books for the course on world literature. The class filled in twenty minutes, with ninety incarcerated men on the waiting list.
 
In 2010, after two years of teaching by herself, her graduate school friend Bill Taft joined the work. Together, they co-direct Common Good Atlanta, which has grown to more than sixty faculty members teaching over thirty-five courses across four prisons.