Alexi Panos

If you're confronted with a situation you know just isn't right, what do YOU do about it?

For TEDxCalgary speaker Alexi Panos, her response to encountering extreme poverty in Africa at age 19 was to start a movement — E. P. I. C. (Everyday People Initiating Change) — focused on helping to provide clean drinking water to local families. Since then, Alexi and E.P.I.C. The Movement co-founder Tennille Amor have raised funds and worked with suppliers to drill a number of sustainable water wells in local African communities. They continue that effort today, combining social entrepreneurship and community-building to try and inspire others to take action.

We think E.P.I.C. The Movement is a great example of how individuals can go about initiating change with little more than a passion to do good and the perseverance to make it happen, combined with the wisdom to listen to others and seek help. Like many of our local non-profits and aid organizations, the movement's founders didn't start with large resources and a fully-developed business plan. Instead, they took time to spend time on the ground with the people whom they wanted to help, and learned some things that changed their original thinking about how to help.

Along they way, they encountered the fundamental human reality that our lives can't exist without water. More specifically, they came to the realization that unsafe drinking water worldwide kills more people annually than all other forms of violence (including war) combined, and that most of the victims are children succumbing to preventable water-borne diseases.

They're not the only people focused on the same issue, or even the largest and best known, but they are part of an authentic leadership story of inspiration and deep human connection. We've asked Alexi to tell her personal story of how (and why) she did what she did, and to remind us that water issues aren't just something dealt with in other countries. Even here in our local communities across Alberta, we face the very real prospect of running low on critical fresh water supplies unless we figure out better ways of curbing our over-consumption of humanity's most precious resource.