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WE Charity, formerly known as Free The Children, is a worldwide development charity and youth empowerment movement founded in 1995 by human rights advocates Craig Kielburger and Marc Kielburger. The organization focuses on young people, with programs in Canada, the U.S. and U.K.

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ME to WE was founded in 1995,  as free the children. It was originally founded by Craig Kielburger when he was 12 years old. Craig started this organisation after he read an article about Iqbal Masih, who was murdered after he spoke against child labour. Craig thought this was unfair that Iqbal Masih had to die for speaking up for his rights. Craig decided to take actions to stop this by sharing this with his 12-year-old classmates and that's how WE organization was born. They wanted to create awareness in North America about how child labour and slavery needs to end.    Since one of the goals of this organisation was to empower young people to take actions, they decided to rename the organisation as ME to We in  2008.  WE Day started on October 2007 to inspire young people to take actions to help others through inspiration speakers and artists.

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Is this organization working effectively to achieve the objectives of the movement? 

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Is this organization working effectively to achieve the objectives of the movement? 

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This organization is working effectively to help local and global communities to get out of poverty through holistic methods. ME to WE organization uses methods like education, health, education, opportunities and access to clean water to eliminate poverty. The methods above are effective ways to eliminate poverty in a community because these factors help individuals to be healthy and have resources to allow kids to get a job in the future. Another objective they had was to educate and empower young people.  I think they are doing this effectively because they are encouraging young people to help in their own community or globally and reward them with tickets to WE Day since you must earn this ticket by helping others. There are many people that end up coming to WE Day, this shows that they are many young people involved in creating change for the better. This definitely encourages young people to start clubs at their school to raise money to support any WE projects. I think WE Charity is an effective organiation in achieving their objectives of having young people raise awareness and raising money to help people because they have impacted communities globally.

-Built over 650 schools with 55000 children enrolled in schools

-1 million people given access to clean water and sanitation

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WE organisation was originally known as the free the children. The organisation is trying to inspire young people to be leaders and take actions in their community or globally. They do this by sending motivated speakers to go and talk to students on how they can create change through volunteering, spreading knowledge etc.  The organisation itself also collects money to help free kids from poverty and exploitation by selling Rafiki, merchandise like shirts and etc.   They believe that if they can provide free education to kids around the world, it will elevate them from child slavery and labour. They have initiatives like WE Villages where people can adopt a village and provide sustainable solutions like education, clean water and sanitation, health, opportunity and food to allow communities to relieve themselves from poverty.  Since ME to WE believe in youth empowerment they have taken many teens to volunteer in a sustainable development project, interact with the community and pass the things they learned to others. Finally, the WE organisation also holds an annual stadium event (WE Day) where young people earn the tickets by being involved in local or global change and celebrate their actions with artists like Demi Lovato, Jenifer Hudson and etc. will perform.

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 One news article about the organization

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 One news article about the organization

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The article continues to praise how Craig and Marc Kielburger worked hard and to produce educational footprints, through programs in 8000 schools across Canada, USA and U.K.  Craig Keilburger believed that his organization should focus on ending poverty through educating younger generations.

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Many people remember Craig Kielburger as the scrawny, strident boy who challenged Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to take a stand against child slavery during a Team Canada trip to India.

Kielburger's precocious press conference hijacked Chrétien's Asian tour and launched the young activist on a change-the-world odyssey that continues to unfold.

Today, he's often congratulated for his masterful plan to confront the prime minister overseas.

But the triumph that launched him was pure happenstance.

"It was blind luck," Kielburger said in a recent interview to mark the 20 th anniversary of Free The Children, the $40-million-a-year charity that he has nurtured from its infancy.

When you're 12, you don't know any better.

Kielburger didn't know Chrétien would be in India until a few days before the prime minister landed, which is when he formulated his plan to hold a press conference and demand a meeting.

"When you're 12, you don't know any better," he says.

The vast majority of charities never amount to much. The charitable sector is dominated by large, established institutions - the United Way, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, Goodwill Industries, UNICEF - that make it difficult for newcomers to take root and grow to scale.

In the U.S., only one per cent of the country's 1.1 million charities have annual budgets that top $1 million. Similarly, most of Canada's 86,000 charities are small operations.

But driven by the relentless ambition of Kielburger, and his older brother, Marc, Free The Children has managed to overcome those odds through a combination of luck, daring and business-savvy.

The charity recently embarked on an internal review process to identify what it hopes to accomplish in the next two decades.

Not surprisingly, the Kielburgers have set themselves an outsized target: to modernize the education system. Although their plan is still being formulated, the Kielburgers want to dramatically increase the charity's educational footprint - its programs are already in about 8,000 schools in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. - while promoting "21 st century learning skills:" critical thinking, critical research, problem solving, leadership, perseverance, grit.

"The nature of education fundamentally has not changed in a century - and I say this as someone whose parents are both teachers," says Kielburger.

"We want to end poverty and protect our environment. But we think the most efficient way of achieving that is to change the way a generation of young people is educated. That's how you'll shift the world."

The goal might seem improbable, yet it's hard to bet against the Kielburgers when Free The Children already represents the unlikeliest of success stories: a kids' group that transformed itself into one of Canada's signature charities.

In late April 1995, a dozen 12-year-olds gathered around Craig Kielburger's kitchen table, north of Toronto, in response to his classroom appeal for help: he wanted to do something about the murder of a young activist in Pakistan, Iqbal Masih, who was working to end child slavery.

The students decided to form an activist group. Kielburger organized his own tour of Asia to get a first-hand look at child slavery.

That endeavour - Kielburger celebrated his 13 th birthday while travelling without his parents to Bangladesh, Thailand, Nepal, India and Pakistan - would culminate in his encounter with Chrétien and provide Free The Children with a flood of free publicity, including an appearance on the U.S. news program 60 Minutes.

Donations rolled in: quarters and loonies taped to letters from other children. Income from Kielburger's book and speeches bolstered the fledgling charity, which railed against corporations that condoned child labour, rescued and housed child slaves in India, built and repaired schools.

Still, Free The Children came perilously close to bankruptcy in those early years.

"We had just $18 in the bank account at one point," remembers Kielburger.

The charity discovered the depths of its financial trouble only after losing its first-ever executive director, who had been brought in to make the children-run charity more attractive to big, institutional donors.

That plan didn't work - most big investors still didn't trust kids with their money - so Free The Children refocused on its core audience: young people. The charity closed its rented offices and relocated to the Kielburgers' home while rallying its student base through awareness campaigns, fundraising drives and online appeals.

The charity's young donors kept it afloat while Kielburger pursued the major gifts that would ultimately finance its growth.

"As much as there were a number of hardships in starting, we were also very lucky," he says. "For one thing, this was an organization whose time had come. We were able to ride the growth of the Internet and connect with young people ...We were also lucky to have the right people come along at the right time to help rescue us."

Among them was Marc Kielburger, a Rhodes scholar who turned down rich offers from Wall Street to join the struggling charity after graduating from Oxford University with a law degree.

"I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Marc: He came at a critical moment and took a leadership role," says Kielburger, 32, who gave up his own dreams of a medical career to devote himself to Free The Children.

In its early years, the charity wrestled with the direction of its overseas mission. Free The Children then funded organizations that raided factories and quarries in India to free children sold into slavery. All too often, however, Kielburger discovered rescued children being resold back into slavery by impoverished families unable to feed them.

Worried that Free The Children was becoming just another part of a profoundly unjust economic system, Kielburger sought ideas from freed slaves, their families and local organizations about how the charity could eliminate slavery: They pleaded for better schools and more jobs.

So the charity changed direction. It admitted that its initial approach had been a mistake and adopted a new, more sophisticated approach to lifting children and their families from the quagmire of poverty. Although its board of directors worried that the move would compromise its brand, Free The Children launched itself into international development and phased out its slave rescue work.

The charity began school construction in Nicaragua, Kenya, Ecuador and India. Those efforts received a major boost in October 1999 when Oprah Winfrey pledged to build schools with Kielburger after interviewing him on her popular daytime talk show.

But the charity soon discovered that schools alone did not set free young girls since many were expected to fetch water for their families - a labour-intensive task that left little time for classroom work. To liberate girls, Free The Children began to drill wells next to its schools and install water collection systems to relieve them of the job.

Still, there were more problems. When the water systems fell into disrepair, villagers would often sell the component parts in local markets. Free The Children's field teams discovered that villagers valued the water systems, but believed it was not their responsibility to maintain them since they hadn't built them.

The charity again reworked its development model, putting villagers in charge of the systems and introducing a nominal water fee. The new model ensured villagers had a financial stake in the work, but it also highlighted the depths of their poverty.

In response, in 2004, the charity introduced its Adopt a Village program, a broad-based development model that sought to bring schools, clean water, jobs, health care and food security to one village at a time. Free The Children is now trying to cluster its villages to increase the impact of its investments.

The model has further distanced Free The Children from its simple, original recipe for change. Yet that willingness to admit mistakes and find solutions has proven critical to the charity's growth by making it more attractive to new-style philanthropists who value innovation and impact.

Jason Saul is the founder and CEO of Mission Measurement, a U.S. firm that assesses the impact of government social programs and charitable initiatives.

"Increasingly, what you're seeing, is a market emerge where the biggest funders - governments, foundations, corporations - they're not interested in just supporting charities anymore: They're interested in purchasing outcomes," he said.

High-tech entrepreneurs turned philanthropists such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeffrey Skoll demand value and results from their charitable investments, he said.

"It's really a different world," said Saul. "And I think Free The Children is a poster child organization for how to be successful in a fundraising world where outcomes are the new currency."

Free The Children has embraced the kind of performance metrics normally used by business to drive efficiencies. The charity has worked closely with Saul's firm to analyze everything it does.

"If you can't measure it, you can't prove it, and more importantly, you can't improve upon it," argues Kielburger, who holds an MBA from Toronto's Schulich School of Business.

The effort to measure impact has extended even to We Day - the most unlikely part of Free The Children's success.

The stadium-sized event was the Kielburgers' answer to a warning issued by the Dalai Lama, who said the greatest threat to the world was a new generation of "passive bystanders." The Kielburgers conceived of We Day as a means to engage young people in their communities, to make them care about their neighbours and the world.

Most believed the idea was too saccharine to win converts among cynical Millennials. Yet, improbably, it worked.

The first We Day was staged in Toronto in October 2007. Since then, it has expanded to include a year-long program of education and community building, We Act, and has moved into 13 other cities, including London, Chicago, Seattle and San Jose.

We Day has leveraged the power of celebrity and pop music to engage students in the world. Mission Measurement has tracked graduates of the We Day / We Act program to assess its long-term impact and found that 80 per cent of alumni were volunteers, 83 per cent gave to a charity every year, and 79 per cent of those eligible voted in the last election.

Kielburger believes We Day has succeeded because it offers an open platform - students can pursue any charitable activity under its banner - while acknowledging the power of engaged, educated young people.

"Most organizations see young people as problems to be solved," he says. "We see young people as problem-solvers."

The program has attracted major corporate donors, including RBC and Telus, and brought stars such as Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Jennifer Hudson and Nelly Furtado inside the charity's tent.

"The positive energy is just so palpable: I was genuinely inspired the first time I experienced it," says Furtado, a Free The Children ambassador and donor who has contributed more than $1 million to school construction in Africa.

Craig Kielburger's energy and optimism continues to fuel Free The Children two decades after its founding. He travels more than 300 days a year in support of its mission. "This is my life; this is my passion," he says.

Like most successful Canadians, however, Kielburger has a chorus of detractors; they contend he's too preachy, too corporate, too much the Western colonialist. Others complain that Free The Children has used its power and profile to defend the interests of Me to We, the social enterprise with which it is allied, most recently by complaining to CBC about a documentary on the volunteer travel industry that included unauthorized footage of We Day.

But not even Kielburger's harshest critics can diminish his accomplishment: He has taken an idea born at his kitchen table, built upon it every day for two decades, and made it into an enduring force for good.

Nelly Furtado calls Kielburger the rare individual who has the courage and conviction to act on youthful idealism.

"The beauty about Craig is that he followed that song in his heart from the time he was 12 years old," she says. "He's different: He's blessed with a sense of greater purpose."

Free The Children (FTC) By the Numbers

650+: The number of schools built overseas by FTC

55,000: The number of children who learn every day in those schools

1 million: The number of people given access to clean water and sanitation by FTC

$16 million: The value of medical supplies shipped overseas by FTC

30,000: The number of women with new sources of income in FTC villages

$45 million: The amount of money raised by We Act participants since 2007

1,000+: The number of charities that have benefited from that fundraising

14.6 million: The number of hours volunteered through We Act

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Free The Children at 20: An unlikely Canadian success story

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Kielburger's precocious press conference hijacked Chrétien's Asian tour and launched the young activist on a change-the-world odyssey that continues to unfold. Today, he's often congratulated for his masterful plan to confront the prime minister overseas. But the triumph that launched him was pure happenstance.

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A summary of the movement the organization is a part of 

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A summary of the movement the organization is a part of 

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The movement of the organiation is to have sustainable methods introduced in communities that will encourage communities to get out of poverty and young people to partake in these changes.  They do this by having multiple things to continue their movement.

-WE school is where they have classrooms changed into an experiential and learning environment, to encourage young people to make impacts in communities.  This includes providing educators with the lesson plans and have motivational speakers to engage students in taking changes.

-WE village is focused on providing each community with resources like education, water, health, food and opportunity to combat any social and economic struggles an individual facing poverty. We for me where they sell Rafiki's made by employing people in developing countries have opportunities to make money.

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One news article about the social movement 

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One news article about the social movement 

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This article is about educating young people is important because it leads to many of other students to raise awareness in their communities and help with ME to WE projects.

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Flipping through a newspaper in search of the comics, Craig Kielburger came across the story
of Iqbal Masih, a 12-year-old carpet-weaver who was murdered for speaking out against child labour.

After learning about the 250,000 child-labourers throughout the world, Kielburger gathered a group
of his classmates to do something about the problem.

Since 1995, the group of 12-year-olds has grown into an international organization-Free the Children-that has built 450 primary schools in more than 40 countries in an attempt to give every child the opportunity to get an education.

"We wanted to start small, and we never actually set out to found an organization, but rather to build one school," Kielburger said from California in an e-mail interview with the Journal.

Now 23, Kielburger was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, 2003 and 2004. Kielburger, along with 11 of his Grade 7 classmates, wrote letters and petitions to governments and organizations to have their voices heard. He said his parents were a crucial part of the group's early success.

"My parents provided the meeting space in their home, pizza and endless support and encouragement for what Free The Children wanted to achieve." Kielburger will speak at the Queen's Advancing Canadian Entrepreneurship (QACE ) Conference tomorrow at 2 p.m. at Grant Hall. Admission is free.

Several months after forming the group, Kielburger traveled to India and Thailand and witnessed first-hand the plight of children his age in developing countries. "Meeting and speaking to children who have been victims of child labour and war changed everything for me," he said. When he came back, he and his friends spoke to other classes at their school, trying to raise awareness about their cause.
"It was amazing how many people did not know about child labour or about what kids in other parts of the world go through every day," he said. "I didn't even know that slavery still existed, naively thinking that Abraham Lincoln had abolished slavery many years ago." He said that after speaking to the first few classes, the organization's goals expanded to include educating their peers about the lives of children around the world. The new organization was funded by garage sales and other fundraising drives Kielburger and his fellow members held in their own communities.

Today, kids of all ages come together to form Youth in Action groups under the umbrella of Free the Children. There are over 700 Youth in Action groups worldwide, as close as Canada and as far away as Japan and Nepal. They range in size from five to 500 people and are made up of students from a variety of backgrounds. Despite the seemingly grand scale of their projects today, most of the organization's development and fundraising still begins at this community level.

Kielburger said 65 per cent of Free The Children's funding still comes from these Youth in Action groups. From building their first school in Nicaragua to providing daily education for 40,000 children,
Free The Children has expanded its mandate to include four specific areas of development: school building, alternate income, health care and clean water, and peace building. Kielburger said the organization targets all the things that prevent children from getting an education.

"Expanding our programs creates not only a place for children to go to school, but ensures that with additional support that they can go to school ... For example, instead of walking five kilometres a day to obtain fresh water, wells have been placed within the community, freeing children from this duty."

Communications Director Amy Erin Schlein said a lack of marketable skills for women has also had a large impact on their children's ability to attend school. "Most women have never had the role of being financial provider for their families," she said. After the tsunami in Sri Lanka destroyed a large portion of the coastline as well as most of the villagers' fishing equipment, many families were left without a source of income. Chief Operations Director, Dalal Al-waheidi said the alternate income program was crucial forthe reconstruction. "A lot of NGOs, after the Tsunami, poured a lot of emergency aid but we're giving empoweringaid," she said. In the Ampara District of Sri Lanka, Free The Children built
a vocational training centre to teach adults skills-from sewing to computer programming-to give families new ways to support themselves. Al-waheidi described their approach to sustainability
as "holistic."

Al-waheidi said they look not just at each aspect of the problem but at the root of it.

"It's holistic in that we don't just build schools, we furnish schools, we provide teacher training and
wages, we provide health care and water," she said. This approach is especially important in countries like Sierra Leone where children are not only deprived of education, but have also survived 11 years of civil war. The health care provided includes mental health and counseling for children who have
been traumatized by war. "In a school you have a person who has been affected by war and a person who has been the perpetrator of war in the sameroom, sitting together," she said. Free the Children projects are currently in the works in Kenya, Sri Lanka, China and Sierra Leone. Alwaheidi said each location has its own specific needs and challengesand requires extensive research before any construction begins. "Ultimately it's what the community wants because the community knows best,"

Al-waheidi said. In addition to supporting Youth in Action groups all over the globe, Free the Children also takes youth on international trips to help build schools and teach children.

Kelly Peters, a fourth-year McMaster Arts and Science student, went to build schools in Kenya after her first year of university. She said she was so affected by it she decided to go again. "To come back and say you weren't changed would be a complete lie," she said.

Peters said she found out about the trip from a speaker in class about Third World development and decided she wanted to go.

"It seemed really amazing and we'd been learning about these issues in class."

Peters said the group divided its time between building schools and teaching.

Peters taught the equivalent of Grade 6 on her first trip and the equivalent of Grade 1 as well as high school-aged children on her second trip. She said the experience really opened her eyes to the ways in which she could help other people and encourages others to get involved.

"For university students it doesn't have to be a trip to Kenya ... but you can get involved in your school and just find the issues that are there. "Don't shy away from issues that are scary, just dive right in
and find out how much you can change."

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kielburger’s crusade to free the children

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Kielburger's crusade to Free the Children

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Flipping through a newspaper in search of the comics, Craig Kielburger came across the story of Iqbal Masih, a 12-year-old carpet-weaver who was murdered for speaking out against child labour. After learning about the 250,000 child-labourers throughout the world, Kielburger gathered a group of his classmates to do something about the problem.

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Would I personally support this organization? Explain why or why not.

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Would I personally support this organization? Explain why or why not.

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I would personally support this organisation. I think WE Charity does a great job in trying to fight against poverty. Unlike other organisations, WE Charity focus on trying to find a sustainable solution that allows people to make income on their own. I think it's great how they are trying to end poverty by providing communities with clean drinking water, free education, health care and help in sanitary, to decrease the number of illnesses in the community. It's great how this organisation is trying to fight poverty by finding the root causes and tackling the issue, so the impact they create will be long lasting.   I like how WE charity tries to include young people and try to educate them about reality that many people face through motivation speakers, taking kids to developing countries to help with the WE projects and etc.