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The loss of WE Charity is the real scandal

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/12/2020 (2129 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For over 25 years, WE Charity has empowered students, teachers and families to take action on issues they care about to make a difference in their communities at home and support those in need around the world. 

What began in 1995 as a handful of Canadian school children fighting to free children and their families from exploitation and poverty became a global movement to create sustainable change that would leave the world a better place both internationally and domestically.

In Africa, Asia and Latin America, WE Charity has worked in equal partnership with local communities to develop tools that have helped them break the cycle of poverty and lead to generational change. Together with local leaders and families, WE Charity has created solutions that are adaptive, effective and sustained long-term by the community itself. To date, the impacts have been as follows.

• WE Charity provided 200,000 children overseas with quality education. 

• WE Charity helped 30,000 women in developing countries launch businesses 

• Empowered one million people with access to clean water

In Canada, WE Charity developed an innovative and free service-learning program called WE Schools, designed to nurture compassion in students and give them the tools to create transformative social change in their own communities or around the world. It also has provided teachers with tools to support their students and address critical social needs such as social-emotional learning and mental well-being. 

For many young Canadians, WE Schools was their first step in a life of volunteering and civic engagement. The program is issue-agnostic; young people and their educators have worked to address hunger, bullying, the environment, homelessness, access to clean water and many other critical social needs. The result is that over the years, thousands of causes and charities across the country have been supported.

• WE Charity provided over 7,000 Canadian schools with student volunteer programs helping 3,000+ different causes and charities. 

• WE Charity inspired young people in Canada to engage in 40 million hours of volunteering through WE Schools programs. 

The impacts that WE Charity has made are significant and the number of lives and communities that have been transformed over the past 25 years are quite simply immeasurable.

Although the international programs are designed to be fully sustainable by the community, there are several larger-scale projects in Kenya that require ongoing funding, such as Baraka Hospital, the only health centre serving tens of thousands of people in rural Kenya, and WE College, which provides children graduating from secondary school with access to post-secondary education in their own community. To meet those needs, WE Charity will transition into an endowment in order to preserve these critical programs. 

Get the facts about what was accomplished, what is being lost, and what Friends of WE are working to sustain.

FriendsofWE.org

This ad made possible by the generosity of the Stillman Foundation