Today is #GivingTuesday. Giving Tuesday is a campaign to create a national day of giving at the start of the annual holiday season. It encourages a national day of giving to kick off the giving season added to the calendar on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
In honor of GivingTuesday I wanted to post about two young people whom I have encountered recently (in print, not in real life). Each one of them has blown me away with his and her selflessness and resourcefulness.
The first was in the book Breakfast on Mars and Other Essays (which will get a post tomorrow) from Craig Kielburger, a Canadian man who was just 12 when he made a difference.
Craig Kielburger wrote an essay called “A Single Story Can Change Many Lives.” In it he recounts his own personal experience of outrage at reading a horrible news story. In 1995, when he was 12 years old, Craig saw a headline in the Toronto Star newspaper that read “Battled child labour, boy, 12, murdered.” The accompanying story was about a young Pakistani boy named Iqbal Masih who was forced into bonded labour in a carpet factory at the age of four. Masih eventually snuck out and began telling people about what had happened. When he was 12 he was shot dead.
Kielburger, at age 12, immediately wanted to do something about this. He took the article to school, gathered friends founded a group called the “Twelve-Twelve-Year-Olds.” In December 1995 before he started eighth grade, he took two months off of school and backpacked through Asia, Kielburger traveled to Asia with Alam Rahman, a 25-year-old family friend from Bangladesh, to see the conditions for himself. His group evolved into the Free The Children fund, and international organization. And his foundation has to date built over 650 schools and school rooms and implemented projects in 45 developing countries through its approach of “children helping children”. The majority of the organization’s annual funding comes from funds raised by young people.
The second story is in the most recent Lucky Peach Issue (#9). In an insert entitled “Guts,” there is a story about Martha Payne, a Scottish ten year old girl who has made a huge difference.
Martha was nine years old and was asked for a class to write like a journalist. She thought it would be fun to make a blog about her school meals (this would allow her to include pictures). So she created NeverSeconds. In one of her posts she wrote “I need to concentrate all afternoon and I can’t do it on 1 croquette. Do any of you think you could?” Her dad tweeted it and soon it was a sensation. People really responded to the size of her meal.
And then someone posted that she was lucky to get a meal at all. She had been helping to raise money for Mary’s Meals for years–in her words, “they provide free school dinners in a place of education in sixteen of the poorest countries in the world. Children can go to school instead of working or looking for food.”
Because of the attention, she set up a JustGiving page that sends money to Mary’s Meals. She raised £2,000 in a short time.
Back at home, her school began improving their meals and she began rating them (one even got a 10 out of 10). And she started gaining fame in the region, making the paper and meeting chefs who were curious about her. And then her school told her she had to shut down her blog. She wrote about it here.
Of course, that made her blog explode. She received thousands of messages and emails and began raising more and more money. She had hoped to raise £7,000, as I write this she has raised £131,219 (that’s 1874% of her goal)–remember, she’s only 10.
Martha notes that $20 will feed a child for a year. Here’s that link again JustGiving.
It’s amazing what determination can do. Happy holidays.
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SOUNDTRACK: RAPHAEL SAADIQ-Tiny Desk Concert #28 (September 28, 2009).
I’ve heard the name Raphael Saadiq for years. I’ve seen his name in print in many places. And I always assumed he was a word music artist. I had no idea that he was an R&B artist who was in Tony! Toni! Tone! (a band about which I know nothing except their name).
I Just Read About That... 