TED Talker Hannah Brencher

By:  Megan Grossi

On Tuesday, September 27, 2016 at 6pm in Vets Hall of the Ellison campus Center the Viking Leadership Program held its second session, all five of which are based off of the Social Change Model of Leadership Development.

This session was centered on Hannah Brencher, former TED speaker and founder of The World Needs More Love Letters. She opened by sharing “one true thing” about herself with the audience; namely, that she had been a dancer as a young girl and quit because she was filled with too much self-doubt. She never wanted to get up on a stage in front of people, so when the offer to present a TED talk was presented to her she was terror-stricken. However, upon getting on stage and delivering her 5-minute speach entitled “Love Letters to Strangers” (which can be found on Youtube) she found herself at peace in the moment, talking about her experiences and the passion that drove her foundation. Hannah learned in this moment that, and I quote, “the things that we say we can’t do, we won’t do, the things that rub up against us like sandpaper are the things we’re meant to do.”

After sharing more of her background with the audience, she told of a day she found herself on the subway in New York traveling to Manhattan, sitting across from a woman who had chosen a far corner seat and tucked her head into her shoulder, as if to hide away from the world. Hannah stared at this woman the whole train ride, wanting to go over and talk to this woman and engage her in the world around her. Instead, she got out some paper and a pen and began to write this stranger a letter. She became so engrossed in focusing all of her attention on words dedicated to this one person that she did not even notice when the very woman got off at her stop.

Left with a letter that would have no recipient, she kept writing more and more. She wrote love letters – thank you for existing letters; you can get through this letters; you are worth more than you give yourself credit for letters – and started hiding them all over New York City for even more strangers to find. That’s when she turned to social media, blogging her endeavors and opening it up for people to request their own love letters, no questions asked. Having expected a handful of responses, she was met with hundreds of emails asking her to, essentially, care about them; hundreds of heart breaking stories flooded into Hannah’s life, and she began to write. Not only would that give birth to her foundation, which anybody can contribute to and request their own letters from at moreloveletters.com, but it also showed her how small we can all be in the world, and how the point of it all is not just about you. It’s about the people we affect along the way, whether we know it or not. She even suggested to the audience that the biggest impacts we have on others will be the ones we never see.

A powerful moment during her talk was a story about her friend who, a few years back, had prepared to propose to his girlfriend when she broke up with him. Seeing her friend’s heartbreak and devastation, she advertised the help of women on her blog, and was again met with more volunteers than she could have expected, to all of whom she gave out her friend’s phone number and told them all to call him, text him, just reach out to him and wish him a happy birthday. And afterwards, she texted back and called back all 300 strangers who made his world a little brighter by telling him, “You matter; come matter here.”

Hannah Brencher delivered an incredibly strong, powerful message on Tuesday, and ended it, after many other heart-wrenching stories about people who needed her letters, on a note of genuine human compassion. She urged people to go out and do something for another that they would not normally do, whether it be giving a blue stranger a hug or writing a letter to an old friend. Hannah insisted that changing somebody’s life can start with the smallest step, and asked the audience two concluding questions: “What is it that you want to do? Today? Tomorrow? Five years from now?” And secondly, “do you want to make a little bit of history?” You just might change the history of a stranger on the subway.

Session three will be held on October 17, 2016 from 12pm-1pm in Viking Hall Room 123, adjacent to Starbucks.

Megan Grossi '18 is an English major with a Theatre Arts minor.