Thousands of Calgary students joined in on a global movement aimed at empowering the planet’s youth to make the world a better place.
The Scotiabank Saddledome played host to about 16,000 students and teachers who were invited to take part in the day intended to kick-start a year of global action.
The students had to earn admission to We Day by taking on one local and one global action.
Hannah Alper, 11, is a We Day Speaker and told the crowd about how her generation is changing the world one action at a time.
“I’m really excited to see everyone perform and talk about how they changed the world,” said Hannah. “People aren't as lucky as us in some communities and why not help, why not give them education because so many things can be unlocked with education.”
Co-founders, Craig and Marc Kielburger, revved up the crowd with a big thank you to the students from over 550 schools.
“Today you’ve tackled some of the toughest issues and the most important issues facing our world and no one, no one, deserves to be here more than each and every one of you. So if you have fund raised for a cause, if you’ve raised awareness about an issue, if you’ve volunteered with a local community group, we want you to make some noise and give yourselves a round of applause,” said Craig Kielburger.
The Kielburgers told the students that together they volunteered over 14.6 million hours of time raising awareness to issues like homelessness, poverty, bullying and hunger.
Craig Kielburger, created the charity Free The Children when he was just 11 years old.
“I read a story about child labour in Pakistan and I brought this to my class and we couldn’t find any organization to really help us young people take action and that’s where all of this was born from. We wanted to create a program, available to kids, fully for free, to help them take any cause they care about and turn that into action. So these kids supported 700 different charities to earn their way to We Day,” he said.
The lineup of speakers and performers at the Calgary event included; Actress Mia Farrow, Recording artist, Shawn Desman, Olympian, Silken Laumann, Editor in Chief of Forbes Magazine, Steve Forbes and a number of other dignitaries and special guests.
Organizers say We Day is more than a one day event and is connected to the year-long We Act program, which offers educational resources and campaigns to inspire youth to continue to create the change they want to see.
For more information on We Day, Click HERE.
