One of the organizers of the fight to save the library phoned me a few days later, wondering if I would attend a second meeting. Eventually I was asked to speak on behalf of elementary school students to a large gathering that included the mayor and our city councillor.
It was the first time I had become involved in an issue that was bigger than myself. In the end, we lost the fight to save the library, but I had learned a lot from the experience. I learned that children’s opinions are seldom considered, even when it’s an issue that affects them directly. I learned that many adults don’t think of us as having a role to play in issues of social justice, assuming that we have little to contribute. But I also learned that, with enough determination, young people could be heard. And that what it required, first and foremost, was a sound understanding of an issue and the confidence to speak openly about it. Only then would we establish our credibility.
When Free The Children travelled to downtown Toronto for the youth fair that Saturday morning in April 1995, we hardly knew what to expect.
We proudly set up our makeshift information board on a table and sat on the floor in a circle, where we stapled our information sheets together. As we did so, we couldn’t help noticing the other organizations’ impressive displays, their large, glossy panels, their professional brochures, their neat arrangements of videos and books. But the one thing the other groups didn’t have was elementary school children. A few high school students took part, but mostly there were adults who spoke at the fair about what their organizations were doing “for” children. We were the only children speaking for themselves.
People flocked around our table to hear what we had to say. Twelve-year-old children working for other children? Children speaking for themselves about human rights? We were an oddity. That day the second goal of our group began to emerge: putting more power in the hands of young people. Children needed to have a voice and had to be able to participate in issues that affect them. Who best to understand children than other children? We realized that not only did children like Iqbal need to be freed from physical enslavement, but children like us needed to be freed from the misconception that we were not smart enough, old enough or capable enough to contribute to social issues.
Over the next two months, we came to feel that our group had built a solid foundation. We had a name, we had definite goals, and soon we were to have an office.
My house seemed to be the ideal location. It had always been open to kids. Marc’s friends and my friends had always used our house as a place to get together for fun, school projects or parties. There were young people constantly coming and going.
Even better, there weren’t a lot of doors separating one room from the next. One member of Free The Children (or FTC for short) could be working in the living room, stapling together information sheets; others could be in the dining room, discussing strategy; another could be at the kitchen table, writing letters. As wonderful as this idea sounded, and as much as we all felt it would work, my parents weren’t so thrilled.
“How about the den?” my mother suggested. “I think that’s a more reasonable possibility.”
The den had once been a garage and, as my mother pointed out, had the great advantage of being close to the front door, so that people could come and go without much disturbance. We checked it out and, much to my parents’ delight, decided it would be perfect. We retrieved an old filing cabinet from the basement, added a table and a bookcase, and we were in business.
Soon the filing cabinet started to fill with print material from the numerous organizations to whom we had sent letters requesting information. We cut out articles and compiled press clippings on the issue of child labour and filled our shelves with books, videotapes and any other information we could find. We covered the walls with posters and moved in the family computer, which was soon in constant use. Before long, we were putting together basic kits for distribution to schools and anyone else who might contact us for information about our organization and the issue of child labour.
One night my dad brought me into the room to remind me that I had left the lights on (something I did all the time). I remember standing there, with my hand on the light switch, looking around and thinking: It’s amazing that with such a small group we can do all this. We had grown an incredible amount in the space of a few months—and in the months to come, we could only grow bigger.
We were ready to take our campaign on the road. I drew up a letter in which I spoke about Free The Children and how we wanted to reach out and talk about the issue of child labour with young people. I gave it to my principal, and he arranged for it to be distributed to all the schools within our school district. The response was slow. It made us think that not many adults believed a group of twelve-year-olds could hold a class’s attention for more than ten minutes.
Our first request came from a neighbouring school. With a date in place, we set to work preparing for our visit. We decided the best approach would be to tell stories of the children, the same stories that had affected us so deeply when we first heard them.
When the day came, we crowded aboard my family’s minivan. At the school we piled out, clutching our posters and information sheets. We walked nervously and almost in single file, towards the first classroom. Each of us was going over in our minds what we would say.
The teacher was very friendly. She explained to the students who we were and why we had come. We stood there—Ashley Stetts, Vance Ciara-mella and I—lined across the room in front of the blackboard, almost as if we were facing a firing squad. We all took a deep breath.
Vance spoke about Iqbal. Ashley told the story of a young girl named Easwaris who worked in a fireworks factory. Her job was loading the sulphur and charcoal into the fireworks tubes. There had been an explosion in which Easwaris’s eight-year-old sister had been killed, and she herself now had scars lining her back and arms.
“According to the International Labour Organization, there are more than 250 million working children,” I told the students. “That’s equal to the entire population of the United States!”
By the end of the presentation, the students were just as shocked as we had been when we first heard about child labour. We left them with a challenge to take their first action and write a letter. It could be to a company, asking them to ensure that their products were child labour-free, or to a world leader, challenging them to put more money into education and the protection of children, or to the Pakistani government, demanding that Iqbal’s killers be brought to justice.
We went from class to class, giving the same speech. And each time we had the same response. The students were eager to get involved. They wanted to help. In fact, by the time we finished the fourth class, the teacher brought us back to the first and the students presented us with a pile of letters.
These were the first of thousands of such letters we would receive from children in the years that followed.
Slowly but surely, our campaign began to grow. Speaking at one school led to an invitation to speak at another, and then at another. We began to receive invitations from parent-teacher associations, local churches, and service groups. More and more letters filled our office files, and more and more information covered our walls.
We began to get a reputation as an organization that provided good speakers who were able to hold the attention of a crowd. In late May we received a request to speak to a world issues class at a high school, Brebeuf College. The presentation would be to a class of Grade 13 students, most of them six or seven years older than we were. It was certainly a big jump from speaking to those first Grade 5 and 6 classes.
The session took place in a portable classroom on a hot spring day. Despite every window being open, the place was stifling. The thirty students, in their white shirts and loosened ties, filled the room. It looked like a mini-United Nations; there were students from a dozen different ethnic backgrounds. One student was twirling a pencil, moving it from finger to finger and back again.
Marilyn Davis, Adam Fazzari and I gave the presentation. Despite the age of our audience, we felt confident about what we had to say. After all, we had given the same