Frida Rydland Fossum is an architecture student and founder of the Ripple Foundation. Her interest in community development began when she travelled to Sierra Leone as a high school student, and over more than a decade has taken her into community projects in both Sierra Leone and Kenya.

Architecture has become one of the ways Frida turns ideas into action. Through her work, she has been involved in building projects that bring together local knowledge and different building traditions, while living and working closely with the communities involved.

Along the way, Frida has become increasingly interested in a question that challenges traditional ideas about aid: what if we stopped defining communities by what they lack? Her experience has shown her that knowledge, talent, ideas and ambition are already there, while access to opportunity is often not.

At TEDxArendal, Frida explores a simple shift in perspective: perhaps meaningful change is not about arriving with the solution, but about using what we have to create opportunities for people who already know what they want to build.