Media Mentions

The following is a list of all media items featuring TakingITGlobal. If you'd like to add a media mention, let us know!

Young People are Unstoppable

The Kingston Whig Standard - February 1, 2010
Young people were told that they didn't need to have big money to affect big changes in the world this weekend.

While philanthropy is connected in the popular mind with the multimillion dollar largesse of Bill Gates and his kind, the second annual Queen's Conference on Philanthropy focused on the sort of changes that people could make based on passion and working together. More people are able to harness that, then are able to tap into that, than a billion-dollar fortune.

"This conference is really focussing on the fact that you don't have to be rich to make positive changes in the world," said Andrea Richardson, one of the leaders of the student-organized conference titled It Starts With You(th) at a downtown hotel.

Noting that youth make up for in idealism and passion what they lack in bank accounts, she noted that the conference chose to highlight people who had made a difference based on what they had done driven by those factors rather than by the size of their bank accounts.

"One of the challenges we were given by a speaker yesterday was to go out and see who could make the biggest difference with $20," she said.

"Everyone in the room has $20, but it's the amount of money that you don't immediately think you can make a difference with, but when you see the students start pooling their money and identifying local opportunities that they could help, you can see how much of a difference even that little amount of money can make."

Paul Etherington, a Queen's alum and one of the founders of MotionBall, a charity that gets people involved with the Special Olympics and which may soon open a Kingston chapter, concurred, remembering the shoestring beginnings of the organization founded by him and his brothers.

It wasn't until The Tragically Hip played a benefit show for the organization that it vaulted to national prominence, but he said it is always more worthwhile to have a personal and ongoing involvement in a cause rather than just making a quick donation.

"Giving is not just a matter of cutting a cheque and sending it off," he said.

"It is getting involved on a day-to-day level."

The issues were more than just local activism. One of the speakers was Cheryl Perera, who as a high school student infiltrated the child-sex industry in Sri Lanka and helped police capture a foreign sex tourist. She also went on to found OneChild, a charity that works to fight child-sex slavery and help children escape it.

"Young people are unstoppable," she said after a rather grim recounting of her time in the repulsive sex underworld.

"I have seen the worst that can be done to young people and the best young people can do."

And Suneet Sandhu, who worked on human rights and AIDS prevention in Malawi and who is now with the charity TakingITGlobal, said global aid is switching away from the old model of megaprojects led by megaliths like the United Nations into small-scale efforts and village-level microloans in which a little goes a long way.

"Now people are recognizing that expats do not know what is best for local communities," she said.

"It's that old saying about giving a man a fish versus teaching him to to fish, and it's great to see young people becoming involved in issues and bringing their enthusiasm and passion to bear on them."