TEDxNJLibraries took place on May 7, 2010 at the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, New Jersey. The event was sponsored and curated by the Princeton Public Library, The South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative, The Central Jersey Regional Library Cooperative, The NJ State Library, and the bloggers of Library Garden. Our licensed name incorporates the word libraries due to our strong affiliation with the NJ library community, but the event was open to all. Thank you to our diverse group of speakers and participants for helping create such a remarkable and memorable day. For complete information please see: http://tedxnjlibraries.com.

Princeton, NJ
United States

Salman Ahmad

Salman Ahmad is a rock star and founder of the hugely successful band Junoon. He has sold over 25 million albums and is one of the most popular and exciting musicians in the world. Salman is also a humanitarian, bridge-builder, and social activist. His real “junoon” (passion) is using his music to bring people together and raise awareness of some of the most important social and political issues of our time: bridging the divide between Islam and the West, promoting peace between Pakistan and India, HIV/AIDS, and global health and poverty. After 9/11, Salman spoke out in the media about Islam and his identity as a Pakistani-American Muslim. He continues to be actively involved in bridging cultures and he has released a song with Melissa Etheridge called “Ring the Bells”, a call for peace, performed at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo in 2007 and at the UN General Assembly in 2001, the first band ever invited to perform there. His commitment to bringing India and Pakistan closer together reached monumental heights last year when he performed the first-ever concert in Kashmir, with thousands of young Kashmiris singing “sayonee” (soulmates).

Leslie Burger

Leslie Burger is the Executive Director of the Princeton Public Library and a past-president of the American Library Association. While ALA president, she launched a variety of initiatives to help librarians transform their communities. As director of the Princeton Public Library she builds partnerships with civic and community leaders to foster the library’s role as the community’s living room. She has convinced donors to give more than $20 million to support the library’s capital and endowment campaigns. She continues to challenge the community’s ideas about the role of the public library. The Princeton Public Library is now one of the top destinations in town attracting more than 850,000 visitors each year. Recently she was named the Distinguished Visiting Librarian for the American Library in Paris, carrying the message of transformation across the Atlantic several times a year.

Sam Daley-Harris

Sam Daley-Harris is founder of RESULTS, an international citizens’ lobby dedicated to creating the political will to end poverty. Daley-Harris is also founder of the Microcredit Summit Campaign which surpassed its initial goal of reaching 100 million of the world’s poorest families in 2007. That same year Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus said: “….no other organization has been as critical a partner in seeing to it that microcredit is used as a tool to eradicate poverty and empower women than RESULTS and RESULTS Educational Fund’s Microcredit Summit Campaign.” Daley-Harris is author of Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government, about which Jimmy Carter said, “[Daley-Harris] provides a road map for global involvement in planning a better future.” In 2010, Ashoka founder Bill Drayton wrote, “Sam Daley-Harris is one of the certified great social entrepreneurs of the last decades. After building RESULTS, he is the person more than anyone else who has brought microcredit into focus across the world and precipitated action. One of his mechanisms has been a series of global microcredit summits. I think these are the first such UN-like events not run by the UN, or by any government for that matter.”

Mimi Omiecinski

Merrick Rosenberg

Eric Mintel

Lynette Day Young

Alfa Demmellash