Profile: Marc and Craig Kielburger Co-founders of Free the Children and Me to We

Reaching out to others is what Craig and Marc Kielburger do best.

At 22, he is continually clasping hands, hugging, making eye contact and talking in his exuberant way about the rewards of volunteerism and helping others on a global scale.

"When you help others, it's extraordinarily empowering," he said one recent morning in the cheerful corridors of Free the Children, the aid agency he founded when he was 12 and now runs in an evolved form with his brother, Marc, 28.

What began as a group to liberate children from slave labour in India now acts as a youth empowerment movement across Toronto and North America. Every year, tens of thousands of Toronto-area students encounter, or become directly engaged in, the agency's volunteer and leadership training work.

In their latest push, the brothers have released a book called Me to We, a guide to creating "a revolution in giving and community building" and to achieving "happiness by helping others." "It's not just a question of charity — that's not who we are," Craig continued, spreading his hands in the air. "We want to change people's ideas. We want people to be socially responsible in every way they lead their life. We want to help create that shift from `me' to `we.'"

Of the two brothers, Craig remains the more outgoing and effusive, Marc the more cerebral looking and lower key. They grew up in Thornhill, the only children of two school teachers, Fred and Theresa, who encouraged the boys to take an interest in the world. "We were always talking about issues," Marc recalled.

Both began volunteering early. At 13, through a school program, Marc worked in Jamaica at a hospice for teenage mothers and a leper colony. At 14, he won the prize for best Canadian science fair project, which he then turned into a booklet, Alternative Home Cleaners, distributed by Heinz on its vinegar bottles. At 18, he volunteered for eight months in the Klong Toui slums of Bangkok, caring for AIDS patients.

"I had patients die in front of me and in my arms," he said. "When you're 18 and you have those experiences, it changes your outlook. That was when I decided to go to Harvard (for a degree in international development) and Oxford (for a law degree on a Rhodes scholarship) to get the best education possible for the work I wanted to do."

Craig's early philanthropic work is widely known. In April 1995, on a Wednesday morning before school, he reached for the at the breakfast table to read the comics. A front- page picture caught his eye, showing a 12-year-old Pakistani boy smiling with his fist in the air. "Battled child labour," the headline read, "boy, 12, murdered." A story told of , a former rug factory slave who had become an international activist against child labour, only to be shot and killed while riding his bicycle near his home in eastern Pakistan.

"What exactly is child labour?" Craig remembers asking his mother. He began researching the topic and speaking to others about it, and with his Grade 7 friends in his parents' basement that September — 10 years ago this month — he founded his children's crusade, Kids Can Free the Children (now Free the Children).

"I think we underestimated our kids," Theresa Kielburger said this week. "I can honestly say at one point (in the fall of 1995) I told Craig he should quit.... I thought it was just a phase. "He said, `No, I can't, I have to continue,' and he didn't often say no to me. Then he started telling me he wanted to go to India."

That December, Craig left for India, Pakistan, Thailand, Nepal and . With an activist friend, Alam Rahman, who was 25 at the time, he travelled for nearly eight weeks investigating child labour abuses and going on raids with groups to literally free indentured children from factory owners and pimps.

On his return, he met with then foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy. The session helped bring about a change to the Criminal Code, saying any Canadian caught engaging in sex with children overseas is to be prosecuted as though the crime had been committed in .

To Craig, the new law represented Free the Children's first tangible victory. "Ten years ago, we said we could actually eliminate poverty and were laughed at," he recalled. "Now (celebrities) are standing up and saying, `We can make poverty history.'

"Ten years ago, the idea of children setting up clubs in their schools to do social justice work was laughed at. Today at (select) schools all across Toronto, our programs are adopted into the curriculum."

Recently, Craig started his fourth year in peace and conflict studies at U of T, with plans for another six or seven years of post-graduate work. At Free the Children, he holds the title of founder and chair. Marc serves as executive director. Their mission has evolved since the early days. Children simply liberated from factories can end up worse off than before if they have no school to go to, Craig says now, or if their family has no other income.

"Prevention is the key," he said. "Whether it's child soldiers or children involved in the sex trade or child labourers, we've found that the solutions to those problems lie in long-term development." That means providing schools and health clinics. Both cost money. To raise the money — and in some cases also supply the labour — Free the Children set out to engage an entire generation of North American children and youth in philanthropic work.

"Many kids are bored by life in the suburbs," Craig argued in his 1998 book, Free the Children, with Kevin Major. "How many games of Super Nintendo do they want to play? How many times do they want to go to the shopping mall?" To him, freeing children came to mean freeing young people in Toronto and elsewhere from what he calls "affluenza" — the empty promise of consumerism — by offering them the chance to make a difference.

Now, at the 10-year point, Free the Children, a registered charity, expects to reach $6.5 million this year in cash donations and their equivalent in such items as medical supplies. It raised $5.8 million last year. Seven per cent of money donated to Free the Children goes to operating expenses, putting 93 cents of every dollar raised directly into projects.

The Toronto headquarters is a slim, white, modern building at the corner of Carlton and Parliament Sts., with a staff of 35 — most in their 20s — including 18 interns from various countries on two-year contracts. Overseas staff in places such as and Sri Lanka number about 30, including 25 locally hired staff members.

Marc and Craig take no salary. Instead, Marc lives on a three-year social action fellowship to be officially announced next month. Craig is a "TD Scholar," meaning the Toronto Dominion Bank pays his education and living expenses.

"What I respect and appreciate about Free the Children," said Eric Hoskins, president of War Child Canada, a Toronto-based agency working in war-torn countries, "is their ability to empower young people. "They are not unique so much in what they do — building schools and delivering medical supplies to developing countries — but in how they do it — by using this great methodology of engaging young people (in Canada and the United States) in a respectful and meaningful way."

Free the Children takes pride in its bricks and mortar accomplishments overseas. It has erected more than 400 primary schools, serving more than 35,000 pupils in 16 countries. Thirty-six of those schools were built with money from and her Angel Network foundation, part of the TV star's ongoing commitment — made when Craig first appeared on her program in 1999 — to build 50.

Free the Children has also delivered more than 200,000 health and school kits to children in need, and shipped more than $9 million worth of medical supplies, including $500,000 worth donated spontaneously by Toronto schoolchildren — without so much as an ad campaign — immediately after the tsunami hit Southeast last winter.

Staff members take equal pride in programs delivered to schools in Toronto and elsewhere in North America.

Taken together, the programs aim to train an entire generation of young people to become "global citizens." Students are shown how to integrate philanthropic work into their daily lives, make consumer choices based on fair trade practices and vote in elections with a view to raising Canada's foreign aid contribution to 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product. Canada's current contribution is 0.27 per cent.

When the government introduced a 40-hour community service requirement for all Grade 10 students four years ago, Free the Children developed its Volunteer Now program, co-ordinating volunteer service in select schools across the GTA. It begins with a how-to guide to active citizenship, adopted by the Toronto public and Catholic school boards as a supplemental text on civics courses. The book shows how to write a letter to the editor, gives tips in public speaking and lists 101 fundraising ideas, such as a pie-eating marathon, ugly tie competition and guess the age of your teacher contest.

Three two-member teams from Free the Children fan out to speak to school assemblies. And the teams create chapters of up to 20 students per school, who keep the volunteer spirit alive through fundraising and political awareness campaigns.

"Volunteer Now is very strong in Toronto," said program director Scott Baker, 27. "We've also started pilot programs in the Niagara region this year and out west in Red Deer, Coquitlam and Surrey. "Last year we went into Cold Lake, in northern Alberta, and the kids loved it," Baker said. "In one case, a group of five researched different fair trade suppliers of coffee and tea, and provided that information to a couple of coffee shops up there, who started providing fair trade products to their customers."

As often happens, one Cold Lake school also asked to participate in Free the Children's "brick by brick campaign," a program to raise $6,000 to build an elementary school in one of 16 countries in Asia, and South America. For every $100 raised, a paper brick is pasted to a wall mural of 60 bricks.

Brick by brick is also part of an "adopt a village" program, being advertised on posters around the city as of this week. It seeks such donations as $100 for fresh water for a family for a year, $50 for a goat to provide alternative income for a family and $1 that with other matching grants provides $10 worth of medical supplies overseas. Free the Children also receives matching grants for many of its other programs.

Some students who join school chapters sign up for the Take Action Academy, a week- long summer leadership training program at Centennial College involving 100 students from across Canada and the United States.

Others join international volunteer trips. They might go to Free the Children's centre in Arizona, alternating leadership training with volunteer work in Mexico. Or they might travel to Kenya, combining leadership training with actual school construction at Free the Children's centre there. Or they might join a group of 20 relief work volunteers to China, Ecuador, India or Thailand.

"It's a holistic model," said Renée Hodgkinson, 28, director of Leaders Today programs. "The students become engaged, develop leadership skills, develop a connection with Free the Children and get involved in campaigns through action-oriented, hands-on work."

Marc and Craig co-authored a book, released last year in Canada and coming out next year in the United States, titled in full Me to We: Turning Self-Help on Its Head. In it, they argue that individualism and consumerism offer only spiritual emptiness and that human beings naturally find purpose and enrichment in reaching out to others.

Contributors include Winfrey, Richard Gere, and Desmond Tutu. "Being involved in this (philanthropic) work has made us happier than we'd ever imagined, happier than two guys possibly have the right to be," they write in the preface. "Could it be we have found the secret to happiness? We think we have."

Adapted from “The Kielburger Crusade”, Toronto Star, 2006 Oct 26, Retrieved on September 5, 2011 from: http://www.thestar.com/printarticle/119762

Reflection Questions

1. What were the defining experiences for each of the Kielburger brothers that inspired them to dedicate their lives to helping other children?

2. Marc and Craig do not view their work as simple acts of charity where they build schools or donate medical supplies to the Global South. What is their loftier goal?

3. How did their parents influence who they were and what they came to accomplish?

4. What challenges do you think they faced when they were first starting? How do you think they overcame these challenges?

5. What kinds of initiatives or opportunities do the brothers provide to empower youth in North America?

6. Does Free the Children operate efficiently as a charity? (What percentage of every dollar goes to help people directly?)

7. If you had to choose between a lottery prize of $1000 or a chance to work on building a school in Kenya, Africa, what do you think would bring more satisfaction to you personally? Explain. (Be honest!)