From PEOPLE Magazine
Click to enlarge
It's easy to understand why. Kielburger has notched some extraordinary achievements with Free the Children, a group he started four years ago to help the 250 million kids around the world who were being forced to weave carpets, pick crops or even work as prostitutes up to 12 hours a day. Now, with more than 5,000 members in 20 countries, Free the Children not only assists local authorities in rooting out illegal sweatshops but also raises money to build schools and help poor families end the practice of selling their kids.
Coauthor of the book Free the Children and subject of the award-winning documentary It Takes a Child, Kielburger has become an inspiration for children and adults alike. "He makes young people feel they can get things done," says Karen Robinson of Amnesty International USA. Kielburger certainly knows how to make use of righteous indignation as a weapon. "There's a war against children going on," he says. Free the Children, he believes, is one way for kids to fight back. "It's a revolution. A children's revolution."
The Toronto teen's world first changed one April morning back in 1995, when he picked up the local paper and read about another 12-year-old, Iqbal Masih, a Pakistani boy whose struggling parents had sold him into bondage when he was 4. Masih spent six years shackled to a carpet loom, until, at age 10, he escaped and began to campaign against child labor. Masih proved a riveting spokesman, perhaps too riveting: Two years later he was shot to death as he rode his bike.
"I looked at my life and his life," says Kielburger, "and I was shocked at the difference." Surprised to learn that no organization existed to aid child laborers, he decided to start one. "I stood up in front of my class and said, 'I need your help,' " he recalls. "I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew one thing: the more people, the more power."
Using his family's den as a headquarters, Kielburger and his 50 comrades spent the summer writing letters to political leaders and circulating petitions challenging companies to steer clear of child labor. When the kids needed cash for postage and supplies, they sold their old toys and clothes at garage sales. That fall, Kielburger struck pay dirt when he took his cause to a Canadian labor group, which donated more than $100,000.
Along the way, the young activist had to win over his parents—Theresa, a Special Ed teacher, and Fred, a retired French teacher—who, at the end of that summer, had told him it was time to get back to his books. "He said no, it was too important to him," recalls Theresa. "That was a turning point for all of us. We said, 'If you really believe in it, we'll support you.' "
In fact, that winter the Kielburgers let Craig (accompanied by an adult human-rights activist) take a seven-week tour of child-labor hot spots in South Asia. "I needed to see the situation," he says, gazing at the children's photos he now keeps on his bedroom wall. "It makes you want to cry or scream. But you have to funnel your anger into action."
Kielburger has always had a soft spot for underdogs. "If he saw a child left alone on the schoolyard, he'd be the one to go up to him," his mother says. Brother Marc remembers that when he started canvassing for environmental causes in 1990, Craig, then 7, "grabbed my ankles and asked to go with me." Being too young to vote, he knew, didn't mean being too young to help other people. "People say we're the leaders of tomorrow," Craig says, "but we're the leaders of today."
And yet, say Kielburger's friends, he is, at heart, a kid who loves to watch The Simpsons, eat pizza and occasionally shove an unsuspecting pal into a fountain. Says classmate Heather John, 16: "He likes making people laugh."
And he likes making a difference, especially in the lives of children like 8-year-old Munnilal, an Indian carpet weaver Kielburger helped return to the village from which he had been stolen by slavers. "Munnilal said that when he hurt the most, he saw his mother in his dreams," says Kielburger, who was there for the mother-son reunion. "She said she saw him in her dreams too," he says. "It was very emotional." And then, for the first time in years, Munnilal fell into his mother's arms.
Peter Ames Carlin
Natasha Stoynoff in Toronto
- Contributors:
- Natasha Stoynoff.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
