DIY: There's a problem and only you can fix it

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0:43Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and our story today begins one winter night in 2013 in an isolated area of Scotland. A small, like a hamlet, called Loch Eilert, fairly near the west coast of Scotland. So, yeah, a very remote place. This is Kate Stone. She's a physicist and the founder of an electronics company. But that night, she was on vacation. Some of my close friends, we spent the little time between Christmas and New Year in an Airbnb and we went out to the pub, drank lots of Guinness and some locals were playing music with their guitars and violins and things and we listened to the music and then they invited us to go back to their place which was a little shed in the garden where they played more music and drank more whiskey.

1:47So we said yes. And we followed our Pied Piper through the dark woods at midnight. I mean, it sounds like the perfect evening. It was perfect. It was all going well. And then something completely out of the dark happened. Something out of the dark happened, yes. I shouldn't really laugh. I think kind of what happened is the locals walked a little too fast, disappeared into the darkness. My friends fell behind, and I tried to be that person that stayed in the middle to keep the two groups together. So I ended up on my own in the darkness. The next thing Kate knew? I remember just feeling a massive thud hitting my chest, and then a second thud, and then falling to my knees, and then realizing there was a hole in my throat from where the deer's antler had gone.

2:38A stag, a deer with massive antlers, had mauled Kate. And I found out later that it stopped two millimeters before my spinal cord. And as I tried to call for help, it was really more of a gargle. Did you realize how, what had happened? I was conscious for 40 minutes. It took 20 minutes for an ambulance to come. You know, and my friend came to my side and the one thing she said to me was, just breathe. So I took my friend's advice and I put all my attention onto breath. lie very still and focus on the next breath in and then when you get there focus on the next breath out and then I asked myself the question of like you know am I happy with how I've lived my life and I'm like you know well I wish it was a bit longer you know and it's like it's as if my life was like you know a tv show a series and it's like like I'm the protagonist like I'm the main character in my show and they've written me out as a great season finale like come on a couple more seasons exactly so yeah so my end of season finale was me dying in the forest floor but i'm like i'm really proud of who i am what i've done okay it's time to go out but i'm going to go out calmly but you didn't go out you ended up being airlifted yes they operated on me reconstructed my throat and then they decided to put me in an induced coma.

4:08So yeah, it took a while to get back to reality. It was a slow process. You've come to in the hospital. You know what's happened. You know you've got a long road of recovery. When did you first know that this had made the newspapers, this had been in the press, your crazy freak accident, you know, tabloid papers love that kind of stuff. When did you figure that out? Yeah, that was a few weeks. You know, I gave myself the sort of the luxury of not being on an iPad or any social media or anything for probably, my memory is about a month, but that, you know, that could be wrong. So I tried to really keep away from that, said to my sister, has there been any, like, has it been in the news or anything?

4:51And she's like, oh, a little bit. She didn't tell me that newspapers wrote headlines such as sex swap scientist gored by stag. I just want to make it clear to the listener what ended up happening, which was that multiple newspapers, national papers like the Daily Mail, The Sun, your accident was featured in all of them. But what they did was put it into the headlines. They called you sex swap Kate. Some of them did. And in some ways, they made the story about your gender, not the accident. And I guess just explain to people how it felt to read that. So yes, I'm a trans woman, but calling me a sex swap scientist is derogatory and not pertinent to the story, but it implies that it is.

5:46And it tells everyone who sees that, which is probably a few million people that when you see someone that's trans you label them as someone that's trans to say you know hey tranny i'm talking to you you know when it's nothing to do with that it's offensive it's absolutely inappropriate but worst of all to me is it tells a nation that this is how you refer to a trans person they wanted to know former name dates of operation what operations you know they made that part of the story it's not part of the story it's absolutely irrelevant you know I was lay on a forest floor goled by a stag and they wanted to sensationalize it you know my children had to leave that home because of the camera crews outside they had to they had to leave where they were living to go somewhere else because people were interested in this um and wanted to ask inappropriate questions of people that knew me And so I was like, I have to do something.

6:48I know I can make a difference. I know I can't stop them from doing this. But I know I can make them less likely to do it. For Kate Stone, this invasion of privacy, well, it felt like the world had let her down. And as much as she wanted to lean on her family, her friends, her community, she realized she needed to take matters into her own hands. So today on the show, DIY. Stories and ideas about taking on institutions, companies, and stereotypes in ingenious ways. Because sometimes you just need to do it yourself. Back in her hospital bed, recovering from her injuries, Kate began strategizing on how to confront the UK press for sensationalizing her accident, and especially her identity.

7:41A warning, in this section we will mention suicide. I felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility and duty, and I'd seen what happens to other people. What came to my mind was, I think it might have been the previous year, a newspaper wrote a piece about a trans woman called Lucy Meadows, who transitioned as a school teacher. um and they wrote in that the headline um not only is she in the wrong body but she's in the wrong job and she then committed suicide oh gosh and it's heartbreaking and so i was like i know i can do something and if i don't and someone else dies that's on my hands as far as i was concerned So I knew I had to.

8:31And, you know, my kind of science brain is like identify the goal, which is reduce the chances of them doing this again to someone else. OK, identify, you know, the resources I have at hand, which is connecting with them, communicating with them, helping them see what they've done is wrong. And then identify what this is going to cost me and what this is going to cost me is my privacy. you know i take pride in talking about who i am as a scientist being outside of that open about being trans but not talking about it and i only don't talk about it because i want people to know but i want them also to know that i'm a pretty awesome creative scientist you know i want to to be open about being trans in a way where people who maybe have never met a trans woman and maybe are a little bigoted for one moment might be wow i hope my children turn out to be like her you know I want to be like that kind of role model so for me to have to sacrifice my privacy and tell 10 million people that's the price I will pay to you know hopefully achieve my goal here's Kate Stone on the TED stage I'm a kindness ninja I don't really know what a ninja does but to me they slip through the shadows crawl through the sewers skip across the rooftops before you know it they're behind you they don't turn up with an army or complain and they're laser are focused on a plan.

9:54And so I didn't attack them, and they were defenseless. And I wrote kind and calm letters to these newspapers. And the Sun newspaper, the kind of Fox News of the UK, thanked me for my reasoned approach. And I asked for no apology, no retraction, no money, just an acknowledgement that they broke their own rules, and what they did was just wrong. and on this journey I started to learn who they are and they began to learn who I am and we actually became friends and after three months they all agreed and the statements were published on a Friday and that was the end of that or so they thought on the Saturday I went on the evening news and with the headline six national newspapers admit they are wrong and the anchor said to me but don't you think it's our job as journalists to sensationalize a story?

10:46And I said, I was laying on a forest floor gored by a stag. Is that not sensational enough? And I was now writing the headlines, and my favorite one was, the stag trampled on my throat and the press trampled on my privacy. And it was the most read piece of BBC News online that day, and I was kind of having fun. I mean, you didn't ask for a retraction, right? You didn't ask for, did you ask for an apology? Like, what did you actually ask for in your letters? so in the uk the the press is self-regulated so most of the press sign up to the independent press standards organization and there's a set of rules by which they have to abide by about reporting around um you know diversity um or around gambling or suicide or all those types of things so i just asked them to acknowledge that it was wrong and acknowledge that it broke the rules and i asked for that to be published in the press gazette which is an industry newspaper that's really not read by the public but i got it i wanted it on record and they responded in a really kind and slightly shocked way you know philippa kennedy the ombudsman for the sun was like wow we actually really respect the way you've approached us they couldn't understand why i wasn't angry and i think i felt i felt a sense that other people maybe in my community were angry at me too for not using it as an opportunity to get people fired or to actually bring a formal complaint and get a judgment against them get a ruling made against them i just didn't feel for me that was the most effective thing to do i just like to say i'm not an angry activist i'm a happy healer That's a nice way to put it.

12:42Because I can see myself in these people. Like, I just feel that for the grace of God, you know, like I can see myself in these other people. I can see why they have their perspective from the journey that they've taken. In a minute, how Kate's budding relationship with reporters evolved. On the show today, ideas about doing it yourself. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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15:29And you'll be supporting public radio. Listener support is crucial to keeping us going. Go to plus.npr.org slash TED or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And on the show today, DIY. Ideas about rolling up your sleeves and fixing things yourself. And we were just talking to physicist and engineer Kate Stone. Kate had a terrible accident in 2013, which the British media sensationalized, along with her transgender identity. What I saw is on the Daily Mail online article, I saw like 180 comments and 179 of those comments were saying the way you've spoken about her and spoken about her being trans is inappropriate.

16:31So I saw an industry that was out of touch and old fashioned. So it was really about holding a mirror up and all it was going to take is a gentle nudge and done in a kind way. So you got all six newspapers that had written about you to admit that they were wrong. And then what? What happened was I was encouraged by the newspaper industry to apply to this committee that writes these rules, which is formed of the editors, chaired by, at the time, the Daily Mail editor. so you have this room filled with the editors who make these decisions deciding what their own rules should be it was recommended to them that they include three members of the public and they put me on that panel and six years later i still sit on that panel oh you do yeah in the room with the editors who respect me as a member of the public who has a brain and can contribute usually nearly exclusively about things that have nothing to do with being trans.

17:31I'm just a smart woman in the room who has a seat at the table. That makes a difference. And, you know, people will show, can show and say how they still do some of these things. But I know, you know, a report was commissioned and it showed that one of the biggest impact on the press in the last decade to do with trans reporting was what I did. So I know it made a difference. I just don't claim it changed everything. No, but it goes to show that one person taking charge of a situation and being willing to sacrifice yet more of their privacy can have an impact. Yeah. I think there's three things that decides what goes in the newspaper.

18:09One is what the editor decides. The other is the fact that you click on it and read it as a reader. And the other is that you buy the products that are advertised in that newspaper. And as members of the public, we have to realize we hold the power over two after three of those levers. We can choose to not buy a product and we can choose to not click. Every time you click, you are the reason that thing is there. So, you know, we do have the power. We have two thirds of the power. Do you see yourself as an activist? Because there are some people who might think, well, Well, this approach, one woman doing it herself, that can't be scaled.

18:53She needs to join, you know, organizations, activist organizations that are trying to change laws, that are trying to change not just the way one industry works, but the way society works. What would you say to that? I think it depends on the circumstance, right? you know sometimes joining the movement being an activist by joining another group is the right thing to do but sometimes you know we can be in such an independent moment where we can see how we can make an impact by doing something directly ourselves by not aligning us with other people and how other people do things that sometimes the most effective way is to do it yourself and honestly personally i i'd rather be that one person that tries to make a change that no one ever notices or hears and that change never happens than the millionth person that joins the million person march um because you know the biggest movement potentially can come from the individual who just says enough.

20:02And so we should not be oppressed by our own feeling of insignificance. We should always speak out, even when we tell ourselves no one's going to care, because it actually makes a difference. I kind of believe in like, I call a quantum state of mind, which is everything is possible. Everything has a probability. Are those newspapers going to be mean to me, probably, but probably means they might not be as well. Everything in the future is a possibility. And our job is to try and change the odds so that in the moment, they're more likely to do the thing you want them to do. And that's the way I look at the world.

20:45That's physicist and engineer Kate Stone. She's the founder of the tech company Novalia, and you can see both of her TED Talks at TED.com. On the show today, ideas about doing it yourself. And for our next speaker, well, her story starts by doing not much at all, just scrolling through social media. Yeah, so this was July 2014. And at that time, I fully would use Twitter and social media, but mostly Twitter as a sort of newspaper and just scroll through my timeline for any sort of news just to see what was happening in the world. This is Tiffany Ashley Bell. And on that day in 2014, one news story caught her eye.

21:35I ran across an article that talked about how people in Detroit were about to have to live without running water. The article was in The Atlantic and the headline read, what happens when Detroit shuts off the water of 100 ,000 people? At the time, I was a consultant for the city of Atlanta. So seeing the story where another major city was going to shut off the water of a ton of people made me, you know, intrigued and confused. And so I also just decided to read it. The crew came out this morning and cut her off by... What she learned was pretty jarring. For months, trucks had been going street by street, shutting off the water to nearly anyone who was overdue on their bills.

22:20I can't take a bath. I can't wash up. I don't have water to do anything. And it's me and my three children. So people had started collecting rainwater. I think we're going into a third world direction. Others walked to relatives' houses to fill up jugs or take showers. My neighbors who don't have water can come and get water. Even child custody was at risk. A child living in a home without basic utilities like water is living in a dwelling that's like the legal language, unfit for habitation. And when that's a thing, then that child can be removed from that home. Turns out water in Detroit costs twice the national average.

23:00And one out of three residents live below the poverty line. So sometimes they just can't afford to pay for water. Tiffany also learned that the shutoff started after Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013. So a lot of it had to do with the city being under emergency management. The day we decided to file for Chapter 9 protection. Chapter 9 filing came today. Detroit faces a long-term debt estimated at a whopping$18 to$20 billion. Detroit had a lot of bond debt that they needed to pay. And so the solution the city had at that time to collect the money they were not collecting was just to shut people off.

23:41And so what I ended up seeing was people who were in truly dire straits effectively being bullied by the local government. And that's what really triggered me. Let's be honest, most of us probably would have read the article, retweeted and moved on. Not Tiffany. Here is Tiffany Ashley Bell on the TED stage. To me, how they were being treated and how easy it was to simply deny them something that we all need to live was disgusting. It's disgusting. But to me, this also felt personal, even though I have no direct family ties to Detroit. And here's why. Many of the people who were facing shutoffs were black.

24:31Many were also, like myself, black women. And Lord knows it's not the first time in the United States that black people have been denied basic human rights, like water. So to me, that created an overwhelming urge to do something, to help. I mean, I couldn't just read that and then go on about my day. Then it became a question of what can I, sitting in my pajamas as one person at home, actually do? Well, what? Oh, oh, but wait. I'm a programmer. And a heavy, heavy social media user. So I decided to tweet. I hate to hear people suffering and dealing with what is turning into a completely undignified situation.

25:18People are without water. July 17th, 2014 at 2.10 p.m. Is there a directory of any sort where people from Detroit can go for water relief? 4.05 p.m. Info on what people owe Detroit for water is online. 10.26 a.m., 10.27 a.m., 10.28 a.m. We want to connect people who need water bill assistance to folks who are willing to help. Over the course of a few hours of back and forth about what to do, we resolved to do the simplest, most obvious thing. We decided to pay some water bills. To do that, I spent a few hours digging around on the water company's website. And I found something interesting that sort of jump-started what to do for people.

26:06For some reason, there was a 400-page PDF of customers on the website that the water company couldn't deliver their bills to through the mail. One of the things that was interesting about this list is that it also included account numbers for people. So you could just take one of those account numbers and at that time, plug it into the website and see everything about that account. So I did that. And one of the things that was interesting, though, there was that I saw a make a payment button. So the idea then became, what if we got the account numbers of people that needed help and then made payments for them?

26:41So a few hours later, I built a website to find those people and start connecting them to people that needed help. So you build the website. You figure out a way to get people who maybe have some money and are mad like you that people can't pay their water bills, that there's a way to pay them. And you just put it out on Twitter? Like, what happened then? Yeah, so we just tweeted it. My former co-founder and I, we just tweeted it. And, you know, people saw that and they began to pay some bills themselves. I heard from people over the years that they saw the same article and just were like, oh, this is great.

27:22I'm happy I can actually help somebody. That's how in the first 40 or so days of doing this, we paid over$100 ,000 in water bills by just simply. Thank you. Thank you. by just simply sending people directly to the utility company's website to pay$5,$10, whatever they could afford. I mean, so it's a decade later, basically, since that July day, and the Detroit Water Project is now called the Human Utility. Do you remember when there was a moment where you thought, maybe this is something that needs to help cities beyond Detroit? I think some of the earliest stories and, you know, despite the fact that our website originally said Detroit, people from other places just started filing applications and asking if we could help where they were.

28:18And that's that's always happened. We've had people ask for our assistance in most of the states in the U.S. basically. And then also we ask on the application to what people's situations are. And it's, you know, a lot of the same stuff. People lost their jobs or there was a death in the family. We've had people who have gotten terminally ill and they can't work. And utilities don't have a lot of resources for folks, even in just that situation. So we've helped in a lot of situations that are pretty common across different cities. I'm sure you've heard all of the criticism out there. This is a much greater problem than what you're tackling, isn't it?

29:04I mean, people need water to live. It's just that simple. What do you say to people who say, you know, that's a very nice short-term solution that you've created, but how do we change things fundamentally? I mean, I hear them. I think it's a valid criticism. You know, some people have referred to us as a band-aid solution. And a band-aid at least, you know, an appropriately sized band-aid at least gets you into the healing process. You know, I also want to emphasize that we're not the only ones that are doing something around this problem. There are a lot of activists and researchers and policymakers who are looking at this issue.

29:47And I think, you know, for us, we essentially give people a bridge to be able to still maintain access to water while these other folks are doing work around policy change. I always sort of believe we shouldn't exist, honestly. It would be great in 10, 15 years if we didn't have to do this for people because water is affordable in the first place. So what has been the response from utility companies, places like the Detroit water system? What do they think of what you've done? Do you talk to them? Yeah, we do. We do. I will say and just be honest, initially, they were not happy to see us. We didn't mean to do this, but I think we embarrassed them as far as having a program in place that worked in certain ways before they did.

30:34But I think we've really tried to do the work and built a lot of relationships with people at utilities so that they know we're not, you know, we're not there to antagonize them in certain ways. We're just there to help people. And once they see that you sort of have the same imperative they do, they want to serve the public and things like that, it's easier to work with people. When you put together and you start doing something that's imperfect, people will see what you're doing and they'll want to join you, make what you're doing bigger, more impactful, more meaningful, but all in ways unique to themselves.

31:10For us, that was the city employees who answered our emails on weekends and then during the week drove people to appointments to get their water turned back on. It was the people in mutual aid groups and nonprofits that partnered with us to completely pay off the water bills for some families. It was the people who actually really made this work possible, some of whom had been in this situation themselves a few years prior, where they couldn't afford their own bills, but they now could, so they were generous about it. It was the people who held bake sales to help people that they didn't know and would never meet.

31:49And people will see you walking the walk, and they'll understand that that compassion is contagious. There's something incredibly, like, simple in some ways or forthright. You read about a problem. You got the information, figured out a system, built the thing, got people's bills paid, and then the water gets turned back on. It really is that simple. But what really seems like the hardest part to me in some ways is not continuing to scroll in Twitter, stopping and deciding that in some ways the buck was going to stop with you. Yeah. Again, I think some of that is just my personality. and for me as a black woman in the united states when you see like your people being impacted by something that's just indefensible at least for me it was easy to try to do something and i also um i'm a military brat and i grew up not wanting for anything we didn't want for clothes water, food, housing.

33:00And I just think that should be the baseline we provide for everybody. Those are just human rights for me. But yeah, people really were enthusiastic about having a really simple, transparent way of helping their fellow man, basically. It was the case of if you build it, they will come. I think so. That's not always true. But I think it was a very emotional thing for people. Everybody sees problems in this country. People are not blind to the suffering of others, but there often is a sort of question of what can I do? People tell me this all the time. You made it very easy to do something. And I think just that resonated with people.

33:46Tiffany Ashley Bell is the executive director of The Human Utility. You can see her full talk at TED.com. And a quick note, the city of Detroit is now piloting a water affordability program with 2 % of its residents. You're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and we'll be right back.