When he was just 12 years old, Craig Kielburger was already turning heads with his work to abolish child labor around the world.
“The purpose of our group is not only to free children of exploitation and abuse,” said Craig when receiving an International Human Rights Award, “but also to free children from the idea that they are powerless, and they have no role to play in today’s society.”
Built 650 schools for 55,000; distributed 207,000 school and health kits; and provided $16 million of essential medical supplies to benefit 512,000 people
to empower youth to remove barriers that prevent them from being active local and global citizens.
“People put us down as being young and dreamers, which I frankly find encouraging. It’s the dreamers who thought that one day the Berlin Wall would fall or that apartheid in South Africa would end.”
It all started when Craig was flipping through the Toronto Star, looking for the comics section. He stumbled across a headline that read, “Battled child labour, boy, 12, murdered.” The article reported the brutal murder of a young Pakistani boy named Iqbal Masih who became an international activist against child labor after escaping from bonded labor at a carpet factory. Craig was stunned; he himself was 12 years old, yet had never had to endure what Iqbal had gone through. After doing some research, he discovered that millions of children around the world suffer from similar exploitation and abuse. This fact made him determined to continue Iqbal’s mission to end child labor.
He began by speaking to his class about what he had learned; a group of classmates took an interest in the cause and came over to his house for pizza to talk about Iqbal’s story. They began imagining a world in which children were free from poverty, free from exploitation and free from the notion that they are powerless to create change. Free The Children was born.
That was in 1995. Since then, this small group of 12-year-olds brainstorming solutions over pizza has grown into an international movement with more than 1.7 million youth involved in Free The Children projects.
“Every young person has an issue that hits them in the heart,” said Craig in an article on YES! Magazine. “But I believe that society has taught them they don’t have the power to change things, that they have to wait until they’re adults to achieve results.”
Craig has shown that youth indeed have the power to change things; that making a difference is not only up to adults.
“Adults find taking action on large issues like child labor a lot scarier than we do,” said Craig on YES Magazine, “because they’re more entrenched in their thinking. They say things like: ‘Oh, I can’t do that. I have a job and a family.’ But young people haven’t become conditioned to think in a little box; we don’t even know a box exists.”
Over the years, Craig has met with world leaders like Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth, while new Free The Children chapters continued to pop up internationally.
In 2002, Craig was honored for his extraordinary leadership in creating one of the largest youth movements in the world with the first World of Children Founder’s Award. To date, Free The Children has built 650 schools that provide education to over 55,000 children every day; distributed 207,000 school and health kits; and provided $16 million of essential medical supplies to benefit 512,000 people. Next week, Craig will take the stage once again to accept the 15th Anniversary Achievement Award at the World of Children Annual Awards Ceremony.
“People put us down as being young and dreamers,” said Craig on YES! Magazine, “which I frankly find encouraging. It’s the dreamers who thought that one day the Berlin Wall would fall or that apartheid in South Africa would end.”