It is way tighter than it should be so far I am losing my shit.
Okay so
Student activism was a Thing when I was in high school, we went to protests, had our politically themed clubs, etc., with minimal teaching involvement. And I was particularly involved in anti-globalization/anti-sweatshop stuff. All of a sudden, there was this tiny child, Craig Kielburger, clogging all the headlines, going on about the horrors of child labour. He was from an extremely wealthy family and he was being interviewed all over the place. He and his older brother, Mark, founded an organization called Free the Children that theoretically raised awareness about the issue.
Despite many, many activists taking this up with boycotts and direct action and sneaking videos of maquiladoras and so on, Free the Children really caught on for some reason, completely coincidental to the fact that the Kielburger parents were rich and the organization didn't advocate anything that threatened capitalism or the companies doing the exploitation. No boycotts or messy protests, just bake sales, and the Kielburgers became celebrities.
Suddenly, Free the Children was a franchise group in every single school. Teacher-advisors would get a big binder full of activities to do with kids to fundraise, with the money going to the organization. They developed a for-profit company, Me to We, that ostensibly sold fair trade trinkets and eventually trips for rich kids to go dig wells in Africa. This is the point at which I became suspicious that they were up to no good, but they were very litigious and immediately buried any investigation.
By the time I started teaching, they had bought housing for their employees and it was basically a cult. There were annual WE Days where kids would go to the stadium for these massive star-studded rallies and hear about how they were "being the change." There was no longer any student-directed activism; social justice minded kids could pad their resumes with this instead.
Independent investigations found a number of irregularities, like a complete lack of separation between the charity and the for-profit business. One donor's son had died, and they supposedly built a school in his honour, but he found out that they also dedicated the same school to someone else's memory. Whistleblowers got threatened. Eventually, they got a sweet sweet contract from the federal government during covid (Sophie and Margaret Trudeau were both WE Day speakers and closely tied to the organization) and the whole thing blew up in both Justin and the Kielburgers' faces and it was glorious.
no subject
Okay so
Student activism was a Thing when I was in high school, we went to protests, had our politically themed clubs, etc., with minimal teaching involvement. And I was particularly involved in anti-globalization/anti-sweatshop stuff. All of a sudden, there was this tiny child, Craig Kielburger, clogging all the headlines, going on about the horrors of child labour. He was from an extremely wealthy family and he was being interviewed all over the place. He and his older brother, Mark, founded an organization called Free the Children that theoretically raised awareness about the issue.
Despite many, many activists taking this up with boycotts and direct action and sneaking videos of maquiladoras and so on, Free the Children really caught on for some reason, completely coincidental to the fact that the Kielburger parents were rich and the organization didn't advocate anything that threatened capitalism or the companies doing the exploitation. No boycotts or messy protests, just bake sales, and the Kielburgers became celebrities.
Suddenly, Free the Children was a franchise group in every single school. Teacher-advisors would get a big binder full of activities to do with kids to fundraise, with the money going to the organization. They developed a for-profit company, Me to We, that ostensibly sold fair trade trinkets and eventually trips for rich kids to go dig wells in Africa. This is the point at which I became suspicious that they were up to no good, but they were very litigious and immediately buried any investigation.
By the time I started teaching, they had bought housing for their employees and it was basically a cult. There were annual WE Days where kids would go to the stadium for these massive star-studded rallies and hear about how they were "being the change." There was no longer any student-directed activism; social justice minded kids could pad their resumes with this instead.
Independent investigations found a number of irregularities, like a complete lack of separation between the charity and the for-profit business. One donor's son had died, and they supposedly built a school in his honour, but he found out that they also dedicated the same school to someone else's memory. Whistleblowers got threatened. Eventually, they got a sweet sweet contract from the federal government during covid (Sophie and Margaret Trudeau were both WE Day speakers and closely tied to the organization) and the whole thing blew up in both Justin and the Kielburgers' faces and it was glorious.