Jodi Sandfort is an Associate Professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and co-Academic Director of the Center for Integrative Leadership. She has spent her career moving back and forth between professional practice and academia, working for nonprofit advocacy, applied research, foundations, and nonprofit-infrastructure groups in addition to academic posts. Her research, teaching, and practice initially focused on improving the implementation of social policy, particularly those focused on low-income children and their families. However, she is now concentrating more directly on leadership development at the grassroots and community level as a way to address our national challenges. She uses technology to enhance her teaching and leads the Hubert project, an online community focused on sharing multi-media teaching resources to improve public affairs education. Jodi believes that much can be learned from crossing boundaries and tries to do so daily. She lives in St. Paul with her husband and two amazing sons.

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The individuals involved with TEDxUMN have a passion for bringing together the great thinkers at the University of Minnesota and giving them the opportunity to share their ideas worth spreading and to discuss our shared future. We provide these great people the opportunity to share these ideas on a global stage and with an incredibly diverse audience. We believe in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately the world.

Check out TEDxUMN at http://www.TEDxUMN.com/

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)