About

Adam eats, sleeps, and breathes ideas worth spreading. He ensures that the TEDxDirigo team has the resources they need to host the best event in Maine. Adam is building partnerships and holding the space for TEDxDirigo to unfold its potential as a movement for positive change.

Adam is dedicated to serving the greater good through alignment with health and creativity. This has been expressed in his various endeavors as a systems “healer,” educator, community organizer, social worker, and wilderness guide. He holds a BA in the psychology and history of consciousness and an MA in education and character development.

Happiest when connecting with nature, Adam is frequently found wandering home with sticks in his hair and a sack full of foraged delicacies. If his wife and dogs are with him the joy is compounded and almost too much to bear.

In 2008, Gil began exploring the creation of a TEDx event at Frontier in Brunswick. Within the year, inspiration and fortuitous timing connected Gil and Alex Petroff, and the spark was ignited. Gil’s efforts are now focused on insuring that our team has all the necessary logistical and operational support to execute awesome TEDx events in Maine.

After years of leading cultural expeditions around the world, Gil built Frontier Cafe, Cinema and Gallery, a destination reminiscent of a traveler’s crossroads – where stories, ideas and culture interact in a rich and dynamic environment. Now in it’s fifth year, Frontier continues to engage its community with experiences that encourage discovery through food, film, music and art. Beyond Frontier and TEDx, Gil can be found with his wife, Chelsy, keeping up with their two daughters Macy and Harper and their growing ménage of four-legged creatures. In those rare quiet moments Gil can be found sauntering in places less traveled or tinkering with old things in his barn.

Janice co-hosted last years’ successful event at Frontier Café. She is heading up a team of people to get some great ideas to our stage for our 2011 events. Janice will be putting our speakers through the TED ringer so their talks will have the greatest impact possible.Janice is a professional actress and executive coach. She has spent the last 13 years traveling the world, coaching top executives to increase their leadership presence and improve their communication. She has worked with Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, non-profit organizations, and taught for universities such as IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland and more recently, Skolkovo University in Moscow, Russia. She continues to act whenever she is off the road and serves as an Affiliate Artist for Portland Stage Company. When Janice is not on the road, she is happy to be home in Maine, researching and re- telling childrens’ stories from around the world, playing acoustic guitar, and training for a triathlon to keep up with her two young boys.

After attending several TED conferences, and seeing the benefit of marinating many brilliant minds in a fine sauce of ideas worth spreading, Alex was excited at the prospects of being a co-host of TEDxDirigo in 2010 and is even more thrilled about this year’s event.

For his day job Alex is President of Working Villages International which is the largest employer and producer of food in Eastern Congo. A job he finds very similar to his role in TEDxDirigo, in that he spends most of his time watching amazing people do amazing work.

When not working Alex spends most of his time watching British Mysteries, reading books on economics, and ranting about how great Maine is.