Get ready to make a lot of change – literally. Free the Children and RBC, with the support of Nelly Furtado and Hedley, have partnered together to launch “We Create Change”: Canada’s largest penny drive in support of Free the Children’s Water Initiative.
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Here’s your challenge: pick up a special penny bag and gather your friends and family to help fill it up with pennies. When the bag is full and sealed, it amounts to $25 in pennies. This $25 will provide a permanent source of clean water for a person in a developing country. RBC branches across Canada will be collecting and sorting the bags from November 1 – December 21, 2012 and then again in the late spring of 2013.
Nelly Furtado and Craig Kielburger announce the “We Create Change” penny drive.
Another way of helping out is to purchase a $10 Water Rafiki Friend Chain, which is handmade by the Maasai mamas in Kenya using their traditional beads. This chain is available online or at Me to We’s Toronto store. Every chain purchased will provide one person access to clean water for one year and benefit the mamas who make the chains.
THE MAGAZINE attended a special press conference with Craig Kielburger, Nelly Furtado, and Hedley’s frontman, Jacob Hoggard. Here’s what they had to tell us…
Jacob Hoggard, Nelly Furtado, and Craig Kielburger announce the “We Create Change” penny drive.
Free the Children’s Water Initiative is helping to provide a clean water source to hundreds of thousands of children. Why is this essential and how can people at home help out?
Craig: We’ve been supporting water projects for 17 years. We have seen again and again that headlines scream for aid – far more expensive aid – when the crisis reaches a point where people are losing lives. It is far most cost-effective to provide clean water for irrigation, for drinking and for sanitation than later to treat water-borne illnesses and to ship late term food aid. This is one of the greatest cost-per-impacts you could ever make. The penny is so small so we looked for an extraordinary impact. $25 in pennies = clean water for life. There is nothing I can think of that is more impactful that a penny can do. As we in Canada phase out the penny, let’s put it to a good use. One last really big hurrah.
Nelly: I’m excited about the borehole of water. If you go on Free the Children’s website, the big question is how does the water come to these villages? I learned on my trip to Kenya about boreholes and how a lot of labour and work goes into it. Sometimes they have to dig as deep as 200 metres to get to the water, which just happened very recently at Oleleshwa, the newest high school for girls being built in Kenya.
Craig: This is actually Nelly’s high school, the one she’s funding.
Nelly: It belongs to the community. All the children and all the youth are over there building it and fundraising. Anyways, they just hit the water. It’s very exciting. They had to go 200 metres deep, but indeed the water is there! There are photos of the water gushing out of the borehole and all the kids touching it. It’s everything to the community. It’s essential for the program to work.
Thank you, Craig and Nelly!
For more information and to sign up, head over to www.freethechildren.com/wecreatechange.