CSI Social Justice

Oscar

Oscar and Bill Clinton have a few things in common. They both love to travel and to help people whom they haven’t met yet. At nine years of age, Oscar is curious and active. The questions he’s asked himself have lead him to take on big challenges, like setting up a foundation to raise money for a school in Africa.. He sees the value of gaining knowledge for without it you can’t do what you want to do. He sees magic as a way to imagine new solutions, new ways that his home, and community could be improved. When faced with challenges he doesn’t back down, and in the process inspires others’ support.< What students said about Oscar>

Lola

Lola’s curiosity has had her make some wonderful observations in the world to date. With the wisdom of her youth she has noticed that curiosity is the key to living a life in the world. Asking questions that arise from reading books and interacting with friends has her being creative and related to the world around her. These same questions have also led her to notice the power of helping people. By helping out she knows that the direct result is that she has fun and gets just as much back (if not more) when she gives of herself. She is a leader in the Help Lesotho project at the Deep Cove School. When the Lesotho Project arose, she wondered why would people not have the same opportunity as we would and started a fund raising program with her friend Oscar and their 2 little sisters that has raised over $900 for the Motati School to help balance out this injustice. When faced with problems like these she asks how would those people feel when they know that someone is making an effort for them and she acts in that way.

Themes

• Creativity
• Helping people
• Generosity: in order to be happy, you have to give happiness
• To achieve goals you need curiosity

Anne-marie Daniel < see her latest video interview>

Anne-marie Daniel is a mother, an artisan , a mediator, a facilitator and a trainer. As a mediator she was responsible for the first five human rights cases in Vermont. Overall she’s an idea person, bursting with projects she’d like to take to the next step. Her major concern is helping with David Suzuki’s “Revolution in a Generation”- to effectively deal with our environmental degradation. For ten years as a single mother she had to be creative and flexible to make a living and provide for her family. She continues to look for new ways to keep important issues in the public eye.  Anne-Marie recently organized a “Sustainability Update”, a day for local leaders, movers and shakers to learn from local experts about new solutions to environmental problems.

Erin Hunt writer, social justice and international development advocate

Erin works for the great good. Locally she is a writer for the Ministry of Children and Family Development. She writes a lot of letters to people to help them find solutions to problems.
As a writer with MCFD, her main responsibility is to provide people with the information they need.

She also works an organization called Opportunities Aequa that partners with groups in other countries that use soccer to promote peace, gender equality and community building.

She has travelled to almost every continent and worked internationally. Erin continues links with other young people from around the world to decide how we want to work on projects including getting rid of land-mines, supporting the survivors and encouraging youth to promote peace.

Sarah Fletcher

New mom, medical anthropologist, PhD, ex-rockstar (but does that ever really go away ?) social activist, world traveller and community based researcher.. 6 years ago she was trying to decide whether to continue in the music business or go back to school to start a PhD, carrying out research in Burkina Faso. Well, she made lots of choices but they involved neither of those options!

She left high school in Victoria to go to Pearson College where she did the IB program, sang in choirs and logged over 100 dives. She received a full scholarship for each of my degrees, starting with my undergrad at McGill. Then she spent 5 years working in Victoria and intermittently living in a school bus with her best friends as they toured around Canada and the US in their rock band. When the band reached a critical juncture-either this is going to be what we DO or a hobby, our bass player decided to go another direction and she decided to go do her master’s in the UK (incidentally our bass player is now a successful professional musician- and they are all still best friends :). Her degree took her to Australia for field work and then back to Victoria where she then had to decide whether to continue on with a PhD with research based in Burkina Faso in East Africa or to take an interesting job with the Ministry of Health.

She opted for the Ministry of Health job, which was a great experience for a few years- but this didn’t mean her world travelling or school was over… She got married, (to the guy she met when she was 18, who supported her decisions to leave Victoria repeatedly for school and adventures and who waited very patiently for me- he also came on lots of the adventures though!) started working part time at a Research Centre focused on Community Based Research (where she still works) and got inspired to go back to school (AGAIN). Now she’s almost finished her PhD in Medical Anthropology, where she focused on Stress and immigrant youth and worked with arts based methods (photography) and other research methods to engage a team of youth research in social action to enhance resilience and provide supports for other immigrant youth in Victoria. She also works on a number of health related projects up island; the main project currently involves working with First Nations youth from all over the island, creating digital stories to promote health and preserve cultural knowledge. While doing all this, she also had the opportunity to travel the world; Brazil, Japan, Bali, Singapore, and many countries in Africa, Europe and South America… but Victoria is home. She had her first baby in June, Xander, so now she also feels like she’s starting a whole new adventure! (Although he also travels and has already been to Halifax, Uclulet and Big White, with his first international trip planned for the fall) Who knows what’s next..

Themes:

• Overcoming adversity
• The music business
• Being ready for surprises
• Road trips and other adventures
• Being a global citizen
• New adventures

Susanne McMillan — Designer, Entrepreneur

Susi McMillan experienced being on top of her career as an event manager in Germany, followed her heart and dreams, traveled around the world , connected to nature, found the love of her life in Australia, moved to another continent, created her own artistic company with her husband in Canada and the biggest, gave birth to her children. Her passion in life is health and nature, which comes in all different shapes and sizes. She loves to get others motivated and exited for taking a stand for what’s important to them, especially kids. Because one day all the big leaders in the world…. were a child. Something a lot of people don’t know… She is also a face painter who turns kids into eagles, wolves, cats and butterflies and gets inspired by their true love for life and imagination.

One of her recent volunteer projects was the creation of “Creatures of Habitat- days of action 2009” where she and 4 other partners organized an event for 700 Grade 6 students for earth day. The Mission: Let kids be heroes today by caring for their local environment, scientific inquiry, learning about solutions and building the skills to uncover how the wider world works.

Themes:

• Follow dreams
• Courage to change
• Using personal talents and gifts for a bigger purpose than myself
• Creating community and the power which comes with it.
  
  Alicia Taylor

To understand the places Alicia has gone and the work she has done, it might be important to know that she is above all, curious: curious what makes the world go round, and curios how to live more lightly on the earth. She spends many hours at a Fair Trade Organization understanding how to ease poverty in developing countries through Fair Trade and spends just as many hours learning how to grow her own food and how to educate and communicate environmentally responsible behavior. She is a grad student at Royal Roads University, an employee of Level Ground Trading, and a member of many food security and community organizations.