Caren BrightÂ
Caren Bright, author and founder of Pamper Lake Highlands, will be a featured speaker at TEDxSMU Women in December. TED (technology, entertainment and design) talks are conferences that bring movers, shakers and thinkers onstage to share their ideas. Bright will participate in SMUâs 10th TED season.
Billed as an âanti-poverty activist and bridge builderâ by TEDxSMU, Bright will discuss strategies for poverty intervention. Itâs a subject she knows well.
In 2014 she founded Pamper Lake Highlands with the simple goal to provide diapers to impoverished young mothers who couldnât afford basic necessities. The women couldnât go job hunting because they couldnât drop kids at daycare because they didnât have diapers to send with them. They were stuck in an endless loop of hopelessness. Bright knew that feeling, too.
Before she founded the charity, Bright experienced homelessness and domestic violence. In her book 50 Dates with the Lord, she shares her first childhood memory â of her motherâs attempt to drown her in a bathtub. She escaped her motherâs failed marriages, suicide attempts and addictions and set out to help others.
Pamper Lake Highlands has grown in 5 years â now offering classes to young mothers using the âBright Futuresâ curriculum which she developed. English, parenting, financial literacy, addiction recovery and other self-improvement programming is also available.
The conference, including other fascinating speakers, runs from 9-5 Dec. 5, and Bright speaks in the afternoon. Tickets are $75 and available online here. (Bright says you can email her at carenbright@pamperlakehighlands.org to receive a discount code.)
