"It's not a question of 'Can we?' but 'Will we?"

I returned this weekend from spending a week with 63 incredible young people, all ready to change the world... I was lucky enough to be a facilitator at Me to We's Take Action Academy! The week was filled with leadership and social justice workshops, incredible guest speakers, and a lot of fun with the kids.

The Academy was held at our Me to We Leadership Centre in Bethany, Ontario. It's ten acres of green forest with a horse farm in the backyard, it's beautiful. When you walk into The Spark Hall, there are break out rooms (all named after a country we work in) and Gratitude Hall (where we eat all our meals). In Gratitude Hall, there are two signs - "Take what you need" and "Eat what you take". After each meal, we weigh our waste and make goals to bring down the amount of food we waste during meals. Our breakout rooms are where we met with our groups and had workshops. At the end of each day, we would go around the circle and say our "Roses (favorite part of the day) and Thorns (worst part of the day)". My favorite was when every kid's rose was Jonathan's speech... it was so incredible to hear 20 kids say he had such a huge impact on their life given what he's done for my life. Another thing we did many nights was "Snaps". We had a "Snaps" wall where kids could write something for each other if they want to whether it's around something nice they did for someone, a way that they really helped out in a workshop, etc... just snaps :)

Three highlights would have to be the Hunger Dinner and Jonathan's speech, Shelley's speech about HIV/AIDs, and the final night.

At the Hunger dinner, we split the kids into three groups - high income, middle income, and lower income. The numbers were based off of actual percentages (so there were only 8 of 63 kids in the upper class) and they were given food rations to go along with their class. The upper class got a four course meal and fine dining service, the middle class had rice and beans, while the lower class had a cup of beans and minimal water. Those of us that were at Academy for the first time didn't know what to expect... At first the kids were being kids and taunting each other, then once the lower class saw us scraping the upper class leftover food into our compost bin they freaked out. All of a sudden the lower class charged at the upper class, grabbing any food and drinks they could. I honestly thought it was going to be bad, I thought we would be making a hospital run, it was scary. This kind of behavior continued until we ended the dinner (it lasted about an hour and a half). We then went outside and had a debrief, as well as one in our breakout groups. Many of the kids were very affected by it... One girl in the upper class was in tears during dinner because she couldn't handle that she was getting so much and her friends were getting nothing. It was intense. Some statistics Jonathan shared with us after:
-There is enough food produced in our world that if we split it evenly among the ~7 billion people in the world... we could feed everyone three times over.
-1/4 of the top 1% of people in the United States own half of the wealth in the US.
-There are 40-50 million hungry people in the United States.
-In the United States, we produce enough food to feed the population TEN times over.

The next day Shelley gave an incredible talk about HIV/AIDs. We learned that HIV is 100% preventable and with a simple $20 a pregnant woman can receive a shot that would prevent HIV from affecting her baby (40% of children with HIV get it from their mother). During her talk, she kept mentioning that a famous quote related to this topic was, "It's not a question of 'can we?' but 'will we?"... and the kids loved that! To sum up Shelley's talk, here are some fascinating facts:
-33 million people affected by HIV/AIDs globally.
-2.7 million people will become affected this year.
-In the year 2000, drug companies made a profit of $100 billion after investing only $21 billion into AIDs research.
-Of the 2 million children living with HIV, 90% are in sub-Saharan Africa.

My final favorite time was the last night... We had our "Action dinner" where all the youth shared their action plans and celebrated. Afterwards, we had a talent show and dance. One of the participants in my group is a very shy girl, and that night she stood in front of her peers to sing Miley Cyrus' "The Climb". When she said how nervous she was, 60+ people stood up cheering "You can do it!!" and encouraged her. She sang through the second chorus, stopped, and was bear hugged by every youth in the room... It was incredible. After that, she informed Jennie and I that she was always the quiet girl in school but she just feels comfortable at Academy and she was so proud of herself. It was magical.

Needless to say... Academy rejuvenated my heart and reminded me why I do my job. Now this week will consist of finishing my prep for Kenya, packing, moving to a new house, and heading to the Massai Mara on Thursday! I am extremely excited for this adventure and to meet 29 new, amazing, young people eager to change the world.

Chat with y'all in August!
Bria