41 Quotes by Craig Kielburger

When I was 12, I read about Iqbal Masih, a child slave who escaped the carpet factory where he'd been chained to a loom since the age of four. Iqbal led an anti-child labor crusade that made global headlines, including the one that first caught my attention.

I started calling anti-child labor organizations, asking how I could help. They told me a kid couldn't make any difference, so I decided to start a movement for young people to fight child labor, and to prove them wrong.

Service learning connects classroom studies to real-world issues, with hands-on activities and problem solving. Youth can study biology and ecology by testing the water in their own community; or learn about statistics, calculating the food supply and usage at the local food bank.

Sometimes it takes a child to raise a village - or to take down an injustice.

While governments are not off the hook, the charity world needs to innovate and find new ways to attract outside investment to boost our social productivity.

There's no magic bullet to end poverty in the world. But if you could, the closest thing to it would be basic primary education.

We've set up groups in schools across North America. They apply and receive a curriculum about different issues facing the world - from environment to health to sustainability. Then, the students take actions from fundraisers to awareness raisers, and some of them even go overseas and volunteer.

Some say there is no uniquely Canadian identity, that our multicultural fabric is too varied to establish a common thread. I disagree. My grandfather came to a country that celebrates diversity, embraces strife with compassion and respects selfless idealism.

My grandfather came to Canada from Romania just before the Second World War, already in debt after buying his boat ticket on borrowed dime.