June 17-23 – Refugee Week
One of the best family experiences our family had while our children were growing up was having two Vietnamese refugees (then referred to as “boat people”) live with us for about four months. The driver behind this initiative was my…
Bikes and Doing Good
This being National Cycling Week, I thought I would relate several volunteering experiences that involved bicycles. The first story took place in Malawi several years ago. I mentioned briefly in a previous blog that on several Rotary Sweat Equity trips…
Saving Lives
Last week was National Road Safety week. I am reminded about how much we all owe to the organization M.A.D.D. (Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the people who volunteer with them. M.A.D.D. was started in California by Candace Lightner, whose…
Mental Health Week: May 6-12
A few days ago, I got off my GO train into the city, almost 2 hours after I boarded it. The normal trip takes 25 minutes. The reason: our train hit a person about 2 minutes after we left the…
Global Youth Service Day
Over the last month or so I have had the opportunity of speaking with a number of young people about volunteering, some of the benefits and some of my experiences. The most recent was in Cobourg, where I spoke to…
Earth Day
At last the air has warmed and I now feel like going outside. In fact, Pat and I took our first hike of the year several days ago with two of our children and their dogs. While there was still ice…
Volunteer Week:
There is More Good Than Bad in the World Until the past week or so, few people had even heard of Malawi. With the devastating floods in SE Africa, along with Mozambique, Malawi has been on the front page of…
Canada’s First People and Our New Young Canadians
I recently was part of a First Contact presentation at the Trudeau Centre of Peace, Conflict and Justice Studies at the Munk Centre at U of T. First Contact is a 3-part film series produced by APTN (Aboriginal Peoples TV…
UN Conference on Children 2002
This blog is taken from my book page 116: “One of the most fascinating experiences I had while being on the board of Street Kids was being a delegate to the UN Conference on Children in New York in 2002.…
Resilence
In my last blog, I mentioned Ronnie Yimsut, our partner in Cambodia and his resilience. This story is taken from my book Creating Opportunities: “Ronnie suddenly went silent and his face grew tight as our narrow little propeller-driven boat chugged…