The Peak

how to save the world

By Deanne Beattie, Arts Editor

What would you say makes life truly meaningful? I was told once that you could determine what a society values most when you look to find its tallest man-made structures. The Cristo Redentor (Christ the Redeemer) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil springs to mind. The 120-foot Christ towers with outstretched arms over “The Marvelous City,” a glittering seaside home to over 7 million people.

In Egypt, the Great Pyramid of Giza, a tomb for ancient Egyptian pharaoh Khufu, was the tallest man-made structure in the world until the Lincoln Cathedral in England surpassed it in 1300. The rule says something questionable about Beaverlodge, Alberta, home to the world’s largest Beaver monument, but smacks of the ugly truth when you survey the Vancouver skyline. If you seat yourself on a seawall bench on the south side of False Creek, you could make out a smudge of the mountain range to the north through a thick coat of smog, but your eye will first and most prominently be drawn to downtown Vancouver’s city of concrete and glass, a bank logo on top on every second skyscraper dedicated to productivity and economy.

If you were to submit to the psychology of the notion, Vancouverites could be said to grapple with their obligations to currency on a daily basis in the same way that people do to Christ in the piously Catholic Brazil. Citizens of the largest Catholic country in the world are worried about their mortal souls, and Vancouverites are worried about their cash: who should have it, how to get it, how to spend it, save it, invest it — and, how to share it.

For three debt-laden, Kraft-dinner noshing SFU students, the getting it and saving it part has yet to be seen, but they’ve been thinking about the ‘sharing it’ part for a long time. Gala, Jessica, and Adam are looking to do something big this summer as part of the Ride to Break the Cycle Tour, a fundraising and awareness campaign hosted by Global Agents for Change (GAFC). The campaign sends 50 young activists on one of two bike rides this summer — one, a 3000-kilometre journey down the pacific coast from Vancouver to Tijuana, Mexico, and the other, a 4000-kilometre trip through 11 European countries from Amsterdam, Holland to Instanbul, Turkey — in the process, raising $200,000 to help end global poverty and educating people around the world about microcredit.

I followed the three students for the first six weeks of their physical, mental, and financial preparation for the rides, asking them each time we met, “Why are you doing this crazy, crazy thing?” In addition to their responsibilities to school, work, family, and friends this semester, they will be fundraising $4000 each to go toward GAFC microcredit programs, and preparing their bodies to motor them from one end of a continent to the other. Amid study stress, financial woes, and tight schedules, these students are learning the key to a meaningful life — and finding that it has something to do with fish.

Week one: Meet the riders

Meet the Riders.

I met Gala Milne in 2005 when we started our degrees in Communication at SFU at around the same time. This bold and energetic young woman has ebbed and flowed in and out of my life since then, appearing at SFU for a semester or two of study, soon to disappear again — once, for a year at home, and again, for a work semester in China. Gala is from Metchosin on Vancouver Island, a community 20 minutes outside of Victoria. She talks about growing up on island farmland and her father’s fresh jam with such seductive detail that you can smell the air, taste the hot berries on your tongue. The Global Agents for Change trip will take her far from home again, to Europe this time. For her, this trip is a big deal.

“It’s the beginning of January, and I’ve been sitting on this for two months,” she tells me. “Around Christmas, I started doubting whether or not I should actually do this.” Having been accepted to the bike ride back in November, Gala found herself with plenty of time to digest the harsh realities of preparing for such a trip. On top of raising $4000, the riders will be buying a road bike and gear for upwards of $1000, plane tickets to and from their destinations, and otherwise supporting themselves until then, paying for rent, tuition, and other sundries of student life.

“Really, I don’t have what it takes, but I realize it’s not just a fun thing,” she says, “It’s a lifetime investment, you know? It’s something I can look back on when I’m however old — 40, or 90 — and say, holy shit, I can’t believe I did that when I was 23.” Quite shy about the charitable aspect of the trip — more so than you might expect a 20-something-year-old woman to be — Gala eschews topics of poverty and aid in our conversations, instead talking most about what the trip means to her.

“Right now, I feel that I’m pretty — I don’t know. I feel very lucky for everything I have right now, and I’m realizing that life is short,” she says. “My dad passed away a year, two years ago, and that’s really pushed me a lot to try and find that bigger meaning to life, or to go out there and get experiences of my own.” And she’s not about to be shy about that.

“This trip is about making an impact, making a statement, and being bold about it. The 28 people that end up doing the ride are just amazing individuals for committing to this, and making it,” she says. “That excites others.”

Jessica Doherty is forthcoming and straight to the point, handling our first interview with a rare confidence. “I lead a very quote-unquote normal life. I have two younger brothers, my parents are together. I come from Delta and I’ve lived there since I was five. I get along with my brothers — that’s why I’m still living at home, I guess.”

It doesn’t take much coaxing to get Jessica to talk about her personal life, and home life figures prominently in our first conversation. She talks with pride about her family, her friends, and her boyfriend Adam, who will be biking the Mexico trip with her. When we talk about what inspires her, she tells me without being saccharine that her mother, a social worker, is her greatest role model. “My mom is a big part of why I do what I do,” she says. “She’s been a big influence on my value system, my belief system — there was no question with her that what I do has to be for the benefit of others.”

While Jessica tells me she hasn’t had a lot of experience in activism work, she has been involved in student government positions, and has worked for groups like SFU’s Volunteer Services, which pairs students to volunteer positions. She tells me her degree in Communication has opened up her horizons, and has got her thinking about the world. For Jessica, there’s no doubt that her life purpose lies somewhere in a field of service to others.

It terms of what motivates her, she says, “aside from like, doing well in the world and wanting to make a place for myself in the world, more and more, I’ve been motivated and discouraged by our generation. There are lots of discouraging things being said about our generation being apathetic, but there’s a lot that is motivating when you look at groups of people our age, or even individual people our age, that take on new initiatives and get things done in new and creative ways. I find that really inspiring.”

Jessica’s boundless energy and ambition seems tempered only by her boyfriend Adam’s laid back approach to life. “It sounds kinda corny, but I’m looking forward to sharing the experience with Adam,” she says. “He’s really laid back, whereas I’m a planner — I’m an organizer. He’s definitely been an influence on me to calm down. That — always having a calming voice in the background — is a huge strength of his and a support to me. He will definitely push me to keep going.”

Adam Drake has almost finished his degree in Computer Science at SFU, but has been straddling the boundary between academic and professional worlds for the last year as he ties up loose ends at SFU and looks for work at the same time. In fact, one week into the ride down to Mexico, he’ll be taking advantage of a day off for the group by bussing from Seattle to Vancouver for the graduation ceremony at SFU.

“I think volunteering is important,” he tells me. “I haven’t been working for quite a while, so I’ve been able to volunteer more. I usually fill up my schedule with a fair amount with work, but taking time to volunteer is good in terms of experiences and I guess, meeting people, but there’s also the giving back aspect.”

Adam grew up in Surrey as one of five boys in a family of seven, and now cites his family as a big reason for his charitable activities. “I think my parents influenced me in that regard,” he says. “They do a fair amount of volunteer work in our church community. I think just having seen people volunteer, that kind of became, just something that you do — it’s a norm that they set up.” The first time Adam came in contact with poverty, his parents pushed him and his eldest brother to help clear out a rundown house in the lower mainland with a family friend. “We were volun-told to do it,” he says. “The experience was a little bit disconcerting. It was really just, like, a messy house that we were cleaning up — nobody was there — but it was just weird to see something so different from what I was used to.”

Adam’s grace in the face of a huge personal and logistical challenge ahead speaks to his life in a big family; for him, sharing and negotiating is part of every day practice. “A lot of people find it weird to see a family so big, but I’ve always found it to be normal. I think I maybe had to learn to share more, because everything had to be split five ways,” he says. “In some ways we missed out on things that other people would have gotten — we never went to Disneyland, or things like that — but I think we made up for it in other ways. We always had a busy house.”

Engaging a new generation

“Volunteering is dead.” Those were the words of Colleen Kelly, the Executive Director of Volunteer Vancouver, a support organization for non-profit and charity groups in Vancouver. Her 2006 blog post caused a stir in volunteer communities when she proposed that volunteering is out, and active citizen engagement is in. “In this era of fast-paced lives and dual-income households, people will have a diminishing amount of time and energy for traditional methods of volunteering,” she writes. “We should not berate this, but instead encourage more flexible forms of action.”

Youth voter statistics are dim, and few young people volunteer every week at the same organization for years at a time — but it doesn’t mean that young people aren’t involved in social issues in a meaningful way. One-time commitment activities like the Global Agents for Change (GAFC) bike rides, that give an exciting experience for the volunteer and make a big impact, are becoming more popular. Free the Children, another popular Canadian youth-led organization, sends youth to developing countries to build schools and connect with locals. Engineers Without Borders sends young engineers to developing countries for development internships, where they build water wells and help to find solutions to infrastructure problems.

Mark Masongsong sits on the GAFC Board of Directors, and says that the organization started by SFU students three years ago was never intended to stick around for long. “The funny thing about Global Agents for Change is that there was no plan to make this a running organization. I think in the minds of Shawn [Smith, GAFC founder] and the team when they started this was a project was just to bring a group of friends together. They just wanted to do something special.”

After the inaugural bike ride, people started asking about coming on future rides, and began donating money in the tens of thousands of dollars. “That was when they started to realize like, hold on, this can’t just be a one-off project, people are really excited about this.” Only as of November last year did the organization start thinking in terms of long-term strategy. “Until now,” says Mark, “the founders have been running this organization, really, by the seat of their pants.”

“This is how a lot of entrepreneurial companies are described,” Mark tells me. “It starts with a vision of a small group of people, and by trial and error, they find a successful niche in them market. Once they hit that nerve, things just explode on them.” And explode it has. For an organization that has been operating only for a few years, GAFC has experienced a whole lot of success, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide microloans in the developing world, and have begun several spin-off initiatives.

When I tell Mark about Colleen Kelly’s comments from years ago, he responds by saying, “I think what she was describing was the reality of life today — in the past, people graduated from high school, got a job, worked 40 years at the same company, and then retired. Nowadays, we’re expected to change our careers 12 to 17 times. I think that society just changes so quickly, things develop so fast, there are more and more, new and newer things going on, that our lives are constantly evolving. People that are committed to volunteering are forced to find projects that they can fit into their lives.”

GAFC’s niche in a vast market of volunteer opportunities is the ability to accommodate participants with demanding lives and tight schedules. Mark has worked with countless charities, including Free the Children, the Red Cross, War Child Canada, Jessie’s Hope, and the Spirit Bear Youth Coalition, and speaks from experience when he notes the change in volunteer trends. “I think a lot of people want to volunteer,” he says, “but they have unique time commitments, they have unique interests and talents. Because of that, as a charity, you have to adapt yourselves to your volunteers — not the other way around.”

Week three

Spreading the word

I meet Gala for the second time at a busy corner café near my place, and before I can set my recorder to ‘on,’ she’s reporting her latest activity at a rapid pace. She’s working out three times a week, biking, swimming, and jogging to get in shape for the ride. On top of that, she’s taken an extra job as a server in a restaurant near her house to be able to pay for the plane tickets to and from Europe, and the road bike she’ll need for the trip. She begun planning fundraisers, and spreading the word about her cause to family and friends.

“I sent out a mass email to my closest family members, just saying, this is what I’m doing, and, would you mind helping me out?” she tells me. “My uncle wrote me an email back, and was like, ‘I’m not really sure about these non-profit organizations. I don’t know how much actually goes to the microcredit people, but it sounds like a fun activity, so I’ll give you $25.’”

People are supportive more often than not, she says. “Yeah, people are shocked. Most people are really supportive, and excited, and can’t believe that this exists. Some people I’ve talked to ask, ‘can I still apply?’ or, ‘can I do it next year?’”

Gala has seen her donation page go live on the Global Agents for Change website, globalafc.com, and she’s begun to become acquainted with fellow bike riders online. A ‘get to know you’ survey has circulated among the Europe group, introducing them to the hometowns, likes, and dislikes of 20-some other young activists. “I met one guy — he’s really interested in digital communications, so we’re going to talk next week about doing a blog on the trip, so that will be cool,” she says.

Jessica and Adam have begun to plan their first fundraisers together, sketching out logistics for pub nights, club nights, and raffle draws. Not much money has come in yet to contribute to their fundraising goals, but it has begun to trickle in. “A relative sent me some money,” said Jessica, “but we don’t have a lot raised so far. I’m going to send out an email to my relatives and my parent’s friends and stuff. Right now you can donate online [at globalafc.com], but at some point, our bios and pictures will go up, and I’m kind of waiting for that to happen.” Jessica and Adam are also researching road bikes, and beginning to get in shape for the ride.

Even though schedules are packed with preparations —“It’s like another class,” says Jessica — the pair remains optimistic about the big journey ahead. “Sometimes when I think about it, I get really excited,” says Jessica. “It’s a cool way to see lots of places. But it hasn’t hit me that I’ll be biking a long way, every day. I don’t know when that will hit me, actually.”

Adam is characteristically calm when I talk to him about the trip ahead. “Whenever we tell people that we’re biking to Mexico, they’re like, ‘what? You’re biking to Mexico?’ It just sounds so weird because it’s like 3000 kilometres or something,” he says. “But it doesn’t sound that weird to me.”

“I always tell people it’s all downhill,” he says, accounting for the trip from north to south down the Pacific coast. “It’s not going to be that easy, but it’s kind of exciting.”

Charity on the word wide web

The Internet is now a part of everyday activity, from studies to work to socializing, so it’s no surprise that the millennial generation has applied the powers of the Internet to their charity work as well. Gala, Jessica, and Adam have used email and Facebook tools to spread the word of their commitments, and will rely on the Global Agents for Change (GAFC) website to gather online donations. They are using email and Skype to connect with their fellow riders before they all meet in person this summer. For GAFC, the Internet has been a big part of their success so far.

Mark Masongsong notes that the organization has utilized personal connections to gather donations. Gone are the days of anonymous donations to tins of change at grocery stores; the most fundraising success comes from tapping into the social networks of their most valued volunteers. “Compared to other charities I’ve worked with, especially considering how new Global Agents is, the only way you can explain our success in fundraising is that building of personal connections,” says Mark.

“Global Agents is too new to have a brand,” he tells me. “People have heard of the Red Cross, World Vision, and Save the Children, but no one has heard of Global Agents and we’ve had no difficulty in raising large amounts of money,” he says. “By focusing less on us as an organization, and the bureaucracies and structure, we’ve focused on what we do as individuals within the organization. When people donate to Global Agents, they’re not just donating to some charity they saw on the Internet. We can track each donation through a network of personal relationships.”

He adds, “It comes down to the fact that we’re less about selling the brand name of the organization, and more about growing personal connections with people. That can’t happen without the Internet.”

This strategy has proven effective for another online charity, kiva.org. Kiva is GAFC’s lending partner, delivering the microcredit dollars right to the hands of entrepreneurs in developing countries, and setting up repayment plans with the business owners so that this money can be forwarded to other people in need at a future date. Lenders browse kiva.org, reading profiles of potential borrowers and their businesses. Lenders offer up small loans of $25 to $100 to the person that they feel compelled to help. Lenders thereafter receive email updates from borrowers on how the business is thriving, and where there investment is being put to use. The lender to borrower matchmaking service that Kiva offers builds in a personal connection to the donating experience.

Kiva was started in 2005 in San Francisco with seven loans being sent out from that site. By November last year, 3 years after they organization began, Kiva had passed over $50 million in loans to the less fortunate. 390,000 lenders in 42 countries around the world have used Kiva, and only 30 staff members at the San Francisco office accomplish all of this growth. The rest of the work is done in conjunction with field partners in developing countries, and by pairing lenders in the developed world to entrepreneurs via profiles on the kiva.org website.

Using the Internet just seems to make good sense. “The big thing with the Internet for a small organization like Global Agents,” says Mark, “is that Global Agents doesn’t have an office like World Vision does, it doesn’t have a staff like War Child does, and it doesn’t have a brand name like the Red Cross does. It short-circuits those shortcomings as an organization. Through the Internet, you can recreate everything you need to run an organization, but do it with no overhead.”

“It increases our reach, and reduces our cost,” he adds. “For an organization like Global Agents that’s brand new, starting without any resources, it’s really all we have.”

Week five

Teaching and learning

The riders are in full fundraising mode, putting their own unique spin on their plea for pledges. Jessica and Adam have hosted their first successful fundraiser at the Caprice nightclub. 100 friends and classmates turned up for a night of dancing at $10 a pop, taking in $1000 for the couple. Gala has taken in a couple hundred dollars of donations from friends and family, and has handmade some cards as an incentive for donations over $25. They’re on their way to achieving their first month’s fundraising goal.

Now, the riders are focusing on making the experience a truly rich one, by introducing learning and teaching opportunities to the ride. “They’ve split us into three committees, so there’s a logistics, an internal, and like an external committee,” says Jessica. “The internal committee focuses on organizing learning that the riders want to do, and making sure that people get out of it what they want. And then the external committee is doing presentations in the communities we visit on the trip, maybe media outreach and things like that. The logistics committee works mostly with accommodations.”

“They really get you involved,” she adds, “which I prefer to the, ‘here’s your trip down the Pacific coast’ deal.”

Adam has made a point of talking to people about the microcredit cause behind the bike ride when he tells people about his trip. “Everyone says either, ‘wow that’s really cool,’ or they seem kind of confused,” he says. He’s quick to note that it helps that it’s an easy idea to explain, if a lesser known one than other types of international aid. “I like the concept of giving a little bit of money to someone in need and getting it paid back,” he says. “I would say it puts a face on things, more than lending from a bank would.”

Gala has incorporated the bike tour experience into one of her upper division Communication classes, Applied Communication for Social Issues, by making it the topic of a final project. “The course is about finding a social issue like global poverty and using Communications to make an impact,” she tells me. “So, Candice [my class partner] and I are going to do a mock ride around Stanley Park and try to get everyone from our class into teams and have, sort of, a competition. We’ll be stopping and asking people that we meet questions about why they’re riding, and then carrying those questions into the ride in Europe.” Gala is also putting all of this extra work to use for her education by packing up the fundraising, planning, and networking experience as one self-directed co-op work term.

That old thing about a fish

“It’s an old cliché,” started nearly every one of my interview participants: “give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he can eat for the rest of his life.” The sentiment describes microcredit exactly. The Grameen bank in Bangladesh pioneered microcredit in its most modern form, giving small loans to impoverished business owners who otherwise would not have the collateral or credit history to acquire traditional bank loans.

The needs of the borrowers are generally small; they ask for small loans to be able to buy essential equipment or supplies for their farm or clothing business so that they can pull themselves out of poverty. The loans are paid back in full, the funds recycled to help another business owner in need. The concept as we know it has been in practiced in Bangladesh since the 1970s, but has only caught on in the Western world since 2005.

Mark Masongsong talks about the attraction of Global Agents for Change (GAFC) to the concept of microcredit. “The big thing about the original founders [of GAFC] is that they all seem to have a passion for social enterprise and entrepreneurship,” he says. “The founders believe that the most sustainable charity isn’t charity in actuality — it’s really giving the people the tools to do what they are passionate about.” Microcredit is popular because it humanizes international aid, extending dignity to the recipients of microloans by expecting them to work hard to build their own businesses. It is also generally regarded as a more sustainable approach to international aid, because the money isn’t spent — it’s invested.

For the SFU riders, the GAFC campaign this summer is as much about creating learning opportunities for people around the world as it is about creating a learning opportunity for themselves. They’re learning how to plan events, fundraise, organize groups of people in continent-wide trips, connect with their communities, and complete strenuous athletic tasks.

They’re also learning about themselves, and what it takes to meet a challenge face on. When they’re out on their trips this summer, in the middle of nowhere, 50 kilometres in every direction from any urban development, the tallest man-made structure will be a bike: a simple machine, light and efficient, emission-free, and most importantly, powered by two legs and a heartbeat. When everything else falls away, isn’t it that we discovered whole new worlds of strength in ourselves the thing that really means something?

Please support Gala, Jessica, and Adam by donating online at globalafc.com or attending their pub night fundraiser on Tuesday, March 3 at the SFU pub, Ride to Break the Cycle HANDLEBAR Fundraiser: Can you Handle it? Local musicians, raffle prizes, and $3.75 drink specials. Suggested donation is $10; all proceeds support the Global Agents for Change Microcredit program.