Sidelines: TEDx, WWF, Impact Hub

Some volunteer work is a long commitment. Some is a season of service to something you want to exist. This page is for the seasons.

TEDxLugano

I attended TEDxLugano in 2017 and left with the specific itch of someone who has just watched a well-run machine: I want to learn how they do this. So I joined the team, and for the next edition I ran social media for an event that filled a 700-seat house. Behind one evening of eighteen-minute talks are months of speaker wrangling, sponsor care and channel-by-channel communication, and I got to see all of it from the inside.

WWF

For about a year I made content for WWF’s regional group in Ticino: original posts, plus reviewing and translating material from the other Swiss groups so the Italian-speaking side of the country got the same campaigns at the same time. Unglamorous, useful, and a good education in writing for an organisation whose tone you don’t own.

Impact Hub Ticino

Later, through my NGO work, I completed an intensive Impact Hub Ticino program on building a mission-driven startup: how to design something that does good and survives financially, which are separate skills and only one of them is taught in engineering school.

The common thread

None of these were my organisations. I was a pair of hands with a specific skill, lent for a while. There’s a discipline in that too: arrive, be useful fast, leave things better documented than you found them.