Ignite Change Now! - Global Youth Assembly

Thursday, 06 August 2009 15:18

July 30th-August 2nd, 2009

Edmonton, Alberta

Saying the second Ignite Change Now! - Global Youth Assembly (GYA) was a huge success is an understatement.

Having Canada’s Governor General and human rights activist Michaëlle Jean listed on the program as a keynote speaker during the eventthat gathered speakers and youth delegates from all over the world meant Edmonton’s own John Humphrey Centre for Human Rights that partnered with the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, Rights and Democracy and TELUS hopefully received some well deserved attention from all over the world.

Another high profile presenter was the youngest winner of the Order of Canada and youth rights guru, Craig Keilburger. Other youth organization leaders at the conference described his children’s rights organizations Free the Children and Me to We, that were founded with his brother, Marc Keilburger, as the holy grail of all youth activist organizations from which to gain support.

Speaking with Keilburger prior to his well-rehearsed speech of empowering youth to help other youth through his own personal experience as a 12 year-old in Ontario who had wanted to help stop child labour, the 26 year-old hybrid of Chris Martin and an invigorated youth pastor came across as a force of optimism for the human condition. A quality that is rare to see and hopefully a new way of people taking on the problems of the world in lieu of a cynical “wait and see what everyone else does” approach to fighting for human rights.

Social networking is a big part of the exposure youth organizations strive to gain as they reach out to like minds to get support through volunteers and funding. It was also something that was virtually non-existent when Keilburger started his youth organization, Free the Children and wrote a book by the same title documenting his travels India’s sweat shops and factories where child labour was occurring under the disregarding nose of developed nations.

Keilburger explains the social networking phenomenon in terms of what it has done to speed up awareness of youth organization activities. “I just met a seven and an eight year old about an hour ago here and they are the youngest conference attendees and it turns out they had a Freezie and bake sale in support of Free the Children and I snapped a photo with them and uploaded it to Twitter, it’s a mobile world. It’s amazing.”

Ignite_change_now Adding, “The short answer is our generation has grown up with this and I don’t even think we really appreciate it, or realize how revolutionary it truly is. Hopefully, technology might help us become truly global because having our shoes made in a foreign country or watching a Bollywood movie, that’s only part of globalization. Globalizing human rights, globalizing environmental standards, that’s full globalization.”

Delegates and presenters alike of all ages expressed the most profound and real excitement about helping each other in their efforts to improve the conditions in which youth live and grow. Whether it was through empowering Aboriginal youth in isolated Arctic communities through hip-hop workshops led by a fifty plus break dancing MA of Social Work who calls himself Buddha and his team, BluePrintForLife, giving the children of war-torn Sierra Leone a voice through a newspaper written by children for children, Pikin News or bringing faraway issues home with the help of celebrities in the T.V series 4REAL.

Keilburger’s goals were once only to eliminate child poverty, but now with his second children’s rights organization, Me to We, where human rights activists such as the Dalai Lama and Jane Goodall speak at Me to We days held in Toronto and Vancouver that bring together 32,000 students across Canada to pledge their commitment to various school building and clean water projects in developing nations, his goals have gotten much loftier and he now strives for the eradication of all poverty.

“We see the change happening, I think our generation could if we wanted to, the question is if we have the will,” he says.

With more and more people energized about human rights initiatives through events like the GYA through tweeting, texting, blogging and podcasting, its not too unrealistic to think, that maybe, youth and adults alike can do more than just complain about the status quo.