
In early January of 2025, the Los Angeles area experienced wildfires that overwhelmed neighborhoods with destruction and dislocation. Many have lost their houses and possessions, as well as neighborhoods and sense of connection.
One Fulbrighter, a documentary journalist who grew up in Santa Monica, Kalina Silverman, saw how she could fill immediate needs in the wake of this fire through her documentary skills. Over the past ten years, she has been building an independent media platform called Big Talk that grew out of her Fulbright project in Singapore. Its mission is to fight modern day loneliness and disconnection, foster curiosity and empathy, and build community belonging. She has helped people from all over the world to engage in substantive conversations to form lasting friendships across geographical, cultural, and professional backgrounds.
For Silverman, using her platform to bring people together in the face of disaster was an obvious way that she could contribute to those in need. She met with fire victims suffering from intense loses, and gave them a platform to process their experiences and connect with resources. She shared their videos through her Instagram account, as a way to get their stories out to the world and connect them to immediate help.



Silverman says she feels compelled to share what’s happening in her Los Angeles community. “The fires here have been devastating — thousands of homes lost, some of my favorite childhood places gone, and even locations where I’ve had Big Talk conversations are now reduced to ashes. My heart is with everyone affected,” she wrote in a newsletter. She is committed to “using the simple power of face-to-face human connection to inspire empathy and support for communities all over the world.”
She spoke with Good Morning America about this emotional video series. “Everyone has lost something. Every loss is significant, but there is also a lot of hope, seeing how the community is coming together.”
Silverman’s road to journalism and Fulbright started through an academic experience abroad. She was a broadcast journalism major at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism when she went on a faculty-led trip to Germany and devised an experimental project to help her get to know local residents. She wanted to go out and meet new people and engage in deeper, more meaningful conversations with them instead of just making small talk.
She created videos of herself walking up to strangers and asking serious questions such as, “What makes you feel most alive?” The experiment grew into a YouTube project that she began to call Big Talk, with the motto: “skip the small talk, make more meaningful connections.” She gave a TEDx Talk about her project, and soon found that people began asking for help making “Big Talk” in their own lives.
This experience inspired her to apply for a Fulbright to Singapore to explore how these kinds of meaningful conversations can create empathy among people from vastly different backgrounds and perspectives. She conducted her Fulbright intercultural communications research project, “How to use ‘Big Talk’ to establish empathy across cultures,” in Singapore in 2017, interviewing migrant workers in Little India and local Singaporeans to foster empathy between the two groups. She had the opportunity to interview and present to local citizens, small business owners, expats, students, religious community members, and strangers throughout Singapore.
She found that certain deeper questions, such as “What has been your favorite age so far and why?,” “What do you hope for?,” and “What do you miss?” were relatable for people from different cultures. While in Singapore, Kalina practiced her interview skills and embraced the culture of Singapore; Kalina also took hang drum, watercolor painting, and dancehall lessons, and expanded her own intercultural understanding.
Since returning from Singapore, Kalina has continued interviewing people from all walks of life, forging connections and sharing what she learned from her experiences. She was named a Fulbright Alumni Ambassador in 2019 to share widely about how her Fulbright experience created mutual understanding and peaceful relationships between people in the U.S. and in Singapore.
As a journalist, her platforms have put a human face on both everyday and catastrophic challenges and helped individuals and their communities support one another to begin the long process of recovery. The Big Talk platform has also been adopted by the LA Lakers, Harvard Medical School, Universal Music Australia, employees at major technology companies, educational nonprofits for incarcerated individuals, celebrities, and veterans’ organizations.