To Marc Kielburger and Craig Kielburger
Dear Marc and Craig,
All Canadians would give their time, talent, and treasure if they felt the rush of energy, enthusiasm, and excitement I experienced at the National We Day celebration in Ottawa. Your dozen or so We Day gatherings each year across Canada and now in the United States and United Kingdom are spectacular ways to inspire young people in our country and others to give and keep giving. I was thrilled to take advantage of the occasion to present four of these young men and women with the Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award – which is now the Sovereign’s Medal for Volunteers – for their exceptional achievements in giving. As governor general, I encourage Canadians of all ages to volunteer and be philanthropists. Volunteerism and philanthropy are essential ingredients in making our country smarter and more caring. And the ways in which we care must be increasingly smarter. National We Day is a perfect example of that intelligence in action – keen minds and kind hearts working together.
The event also got me thinking more deeply than ever about why we give and how we can persuade more Canadians to give. Why do we give? Those who study altruism divide its source into three broad categories: nepotism (altruism is displayed by an individual toward relatives as a means of ensuring the altruist’s genes get passed on to another generation); reciprocation (altruism is a business deal between two people based on the premise “I scratch your back, you scratch mine”); and group selection (altruism exists in instances in which the interest of the group trumps that of the individual). The mystery of altruism became especially baffling when Charles Darwin emerged with his findings. The study of altruism suddenly became a question of science and not solely ethics. That question goes basically like this: If all life is a survival of the fittest, then how do we account for the many examples of selflessness in the natural world? Is there such a thing as survival of the nicest? Biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and neuroscientists took on the challenge with gusto. Three of these thinkers – George Price, William Hamilton, and John Maynard Smith – made the most headway. A breakthrough came when Price applied game theory to the question of altruism and came up with an equation that proved altruism is always – to a lesser or greater degree – a form of disguised self-interest. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. As Oren Harman points out in his biography of Price, biology is not destiny; it is capacity. Just as we humans have the capacity for violence and greed, we also have the capacity for kindness and generosity.
I agree. I consider the act of giving an expression of our common humanity – emphasis on common. We give to others, with no expectation of receiving anything in return, because we feel a kinship to them. This connection is most powerful among family members. It’s also expressed among individuals who belong to the same communities – from tribes and neighbourhoods to cities and countries. In this sense, goodness depends on association and not necessarily on family – the closer the association, the greater the altruism. I especially like the way you put it in your book Me to We. You contend that altruism is a key part of the universal human desire to achieve personal fulfillment. We give to others to complete ourselves.
The sense of kinship and community has always been a powerful force for good in Canada. From the first days of human life on this land, volunteers and philanthropists – native-born and newly arrived – have given of themselves and their resources to others freely and selflessly. We can trace that generous ethos of giving from the experiences of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples, here before the European settlers. How do we know this to be true? In the first comprehensive history of New France – itself based on the detailed record of Samuel de Champlain – Pierre de Charlevoix observed that Champlain and the other French settlers in Canada learned that the Indians of the St. Lawrence River valley judged the virtue of themselves and other tribes by one fact: how they treated widows, orphans, and the infirm. Inspired by this lesson, the earliest Canadian settlers themselves quickly realized that, if they were going to survive and thrive in this forbidding land, if they were going to build better lives for themselves and their neighbours and hold open brighter futures for their children, they must give freely to others of their time, talent, and treasure. They had to. Like the Aboriginal peoples of this land, they realized that our country is too vast, our climate too harsh, the challenges of starting anew too daunting for anyone – even the strongest and most resourceful – to make it on their own. Evidence of these challenges and of the generosity of the Indians was clear at Champlain’s first settlement at Port Royal in 1608: Indians shared fresh meat with the settlers and also taught them how to make a tea from spruce needles, which prevented scurvy.
The experiences of those early Canadians lit a spark that soon grew into a bright flame. Merchants in New France set up the Office of the Poor. The first voluntary agency in Canada, it found work for the unemployed; gave food, money, and shelter to the sick, elderly, and incapacitated; and supplied tools to labourers so they could carry out their trades. Other organizations soon followed. Local parishes, religious orders, and lay groups founded charities such as the Hall of God, the House of Providence, and the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul to support the destitute, care for the sick and elderly, and teach young boys and girls from poor families. In the decades following Confederation, volunteer groups sprang up across Canada to help settle European immigrants and keep their traditional cultures alive: immigrants from Iceland set up a network of libraries and reading clubs; Canadians of German birth in Halifax established the country’s first funeral and burial society; Canadians from Poland who settled in Kitchener founded Canada’s first mutual-aid society; and homesteaders from Hungary and Ukraine became unofficial settling agents, helping newcomers from all lands start new lives on the vast Canadian prairie. As our country grew, crusading advocates such as the St. John Ambulance Association, Canadian Red Cross Society, and Young Women’s Christian Association provided crucial services to vulnerable people such as children and young women, and spearheaded social reform to help ensure all Canadians had access to decent homes, adequate health care, and free education. In recent years, dozens of community groups such as the United Way, Habitat for Humanity, and the Community Foundations of Canada have been formed to respond to community needs, economic hardship, natural disasters, and war. National charitable organizations such as the Canadian Lung Association, Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Muscular Dystrophy Canada, Alzheimer Society of Canada, and many others have raised hundreds of billions of dollars to help find cures for diseases and help comfort those afflicted with them. At the same time, development agencies based in our country are taking the conviction, passion, and know-how of Canadians and applying them to help people throughout the world – your Free the Children being a standout.
The spirit of giving runs like a vivid thread through the fabric of our country’s history. Most Canadians can call on telling examples. My family lived in an Ontario farming community for many years and we saw that spirit alive and well in the tradition of Mennonite barn-raisings, where a community rallies to help whenever a farming family – of any faith – must build or repair a building.
One of the ways in which our family has responded over the years was through education. My wife, Sharon, and I felt strongly that we wanted to honour Sharon’s mother and grandmother, two women who meant much to us. Both women were single mothers who raised families and, despite the challenges, provided good lives for their children. When I worked at the University of Waterloo, we seized the chance to honour their memory. We set up a bursary fund for women doing graduate studies who had overcome their own hardships. What a rewarding experience that has been! To this day, we get letters from the women who were awarded these bursaries. They have accomplished much and are thankful for the opportunities they’ve had. To know we played a small part in helping them succeed is a wonderful feeling. We achieve personal fulfillment by giving to others. It’s our giving moment, and it’s one that keeps on giving – to those women and to Sharon and me.
What have I learned from my experience and, more so, from our country’s long and shared history of giving? I’ve learned that giving has evolved from being an activity carried out by a select few to a mass activity in which every person can contribute because everyone has something of value to offer. I’ve learned that new Canadians have brought to our shores new ways of thinking about giving. And I’ve learned that the very idea of giving is never static. Thousands of Canadians right now are serving their communities in ways that neither they nor others would likely define as giving in the traditional sense. Though this work exists outside of conventional bounds, it’s of great value because it encourages others to contribute in unconventional ways and it helps all of us form a truer idea of citizenship. Why have Canadians in communities across our country embraced this kind of giving so closely? It’s because while volunteering most often takes place in our neighbourhoods, we know that when we combine our volunteer efforts with others, we do more than help and support those locally. We nourish our shared country, making it stronger, healthier, and more vibrant for us all. We create a healthy nation that is the sum of the individual healthy communities that make it up. That’s why there are few tasks more noble or profound or personally fulfilling and collectively meaningful than the seemingly simple act of helping, sharing, giving. There are some who say people give their time, talent, and treasure solely because of what they themselves get out of it. Go for it, I say. If your sole motivation to give is in order to receive, then give and keep giving. Let’s have more of that kind of satisfaction and that kind of selfishness and together we’ll build a pretty attractive world.
Yet recent research carried out in the United States shows that the science behind giving is more complex and astonishing than we’ve ever conceived. Mike Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, has conducted research that suggests money above a certain modest sum does not have the power to buy happiness, and yet even very rich people continue to believe that it does. Norton uncovered one exception to this rule: while spending money on oneself does nothing for one’s happiness, spending it on others increases that happiness. Other researchers are finding that excessive wealth actually influences the behaviour of the wealthy. Keely Muscatell, a UCLA neuroscientist, has published a paper that shows wealth quiets the nerves in the brain associated with empathy. She says that, as a person becomes wealthier and moves up the class ladder, the more likely that person is to lie, cheat, shoplift, violate the rules of the road, and be tight-fisted when it comes to giving to others. Michael Lewis, the writer and polymath, concludes that this research shows that wealth “tilts” the brains of the privileged, “causing them to be less likely to care about anyone but themselves or to experience the moral sentiments needed to be a decent citizen.” Findings of University of British Columbia researcher John Helliwell shed an even brighter light on this phenomenon: we derive greater satisfaction and happiness from the number, richness, and diversity of our social connections than we do from the size of our bank accounts. We are much happier when we give generously of ourselves than we are when we accumulate and keep for ourselves alone.
These truly incredible findings bring me to my next question: How we can persuade more Canadians to give? To answer that question, I think we have to recognize that giving is somewhat different today. Until now, giving has been largely people responding to pressing, immediate needs. Today – and more into the future – giving is as much about finding ways to help that were never even dreamed of a generation ago. Retired workers are rechannelling their hard-won professional knowledge, skills, and experiences to teach and help others. New Canadians are enabling all Canadians to take advantage of different traditions of helping. And Canadians of all backgrounds and ages are going online and using advanced communications technologies to carry out virtual volunteering, micro-volunteering, customer volunteering, on-demand volunteering, and crowd-sourcing. As you know very well, young Canadians are especially goal-oriented, mobile, and tech-savvy. They set aside conventional methods and use new technologies to find exciting ways to express their willingness to help – whether it’s accessing Facebook to help identify missing people in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake; taking advantage of their tech skills to build websites for charitable organizations in developing countries; or making the most of their smartphones to conduct quick bursts of volunteer activity several times throughout the course of a day. In these and many other ways, young Canadians are changing the very nature of giving.
As the world becomes more complex, we need to continually reinvent how giving works. We need especially to be more sensitive to changing needs, to find new ways of delivering help, and, particularly in a society such as ours that believes so much in equality of opportunity, to ensure we don’t have nearly so many gaps in where our giving goes. Our Aboriginal communities are for the most part in a very difficult position, and that’s something that should alarm us. We also have an increasing gap of skills that’s contributing to an economy in which there are people without jobs and jobs without people. And as society shifts and the role of government changes, we need to encourage individuals and governments to join forces to achieve shared goals. Mike Lazaridis’s actions are a great example of this kind of collaboration. He invested some $300 million of his own money in an institute for theoretical physics (for theory) and an institute for quantum computing (for experimentation). He has captured the imagination of governments to see that Canada has an opportunity to be a leader in quantum mechanics. That’s a brilliant private-public partnership that started with a philanthropic gift but that will build a whole new industry. By reinventing how giving works, we can ensure all Canadians give of their time, talent, and treasure. In the reinventing, we must make giving not a switch Canadians turn on when something catches their attention and then off when their attention drifts to something else. We should make giving intrinsic and innate so that we give simply because it’s established behaviour. What are we going to do as a country and as Canadians to make sure the on-off switch of giving is always on? Three ideas come to mind:
We must make giving as uncomplicated as possible. Just as governments try to create regulatory environments in which new businesses have few barriers to entry, we must make sure Canadians have no barriers to giving. No complicated processes; no complex procedures; no convoluted practices. Giving in all its forms should be as easy as dropping a coin into an empty cup.
We must identify and stress the qualities we share as a means of encouraging greater giving. Since relatedness has proven to be the sturdiest predictor of altruistic behaviour, we must convincingly expand our definition of community to encompass as many people as possible.
We must open up ever more avenues for people – especially young people – to give their time, talent, and treasure, as well as new methods to show our appreciation as a country to those who give. As you have shown, the greatest act of giving is to encourage others to give. I call it widening the circle of giving. I’ve travelled across our country to meet with Canada’s top philanthropists – especially those from the business world – to urge them to mentor and nurture the next generation of Canadian philanthropists. Your National We Day is a great way to widen the circle of giving by spurring young people to find their own ways to give. Who knows how many boys and girls and young men and women have been and will be inspired not only by your example, but also by your encouragement and the confidence you show them?
At Rideau Hall we try to make giving uncomplicated, inclusive, and expansive. We re-launched the Caring Canadian Award as a way to acknowledge outstanding volunteers who give of their time and talent to help others. My Giving Moment is an effort in which we teamed up with leading corporate, community, and media organizations to encourage Canadians to give to their neighbours, communities, charities, and causes. And Dare2Give – which is a component of My Giving Moment – gives Canadians an opportunity to dare their friends, family, and colleagues to donate or volunteer with them. Research shows that one of the main reasons people give is simply because someone asks them; an effective way to ask someone to do something is to dare them – in person, on-line, and across social media. This finding corresponds with the fascinating new research I mentioned earlier. Even those disinclined to give can be compelled to do so if they are encouraged clearly and frequently. As Michael Lewis points out, many of the wealthiest and most privileged among us possess the self-awareness to correct for whatever tricks brain chemicals seek to play on them. They just need to be reminded to give – loudly and often. This point reinforces what Oren Harman said in his Price biography: our biology is not our destiny. We have a choice. All of us can be givers.
You two young Canadian leaders have made the choice to give and to encourage others to give – clearly and frequently. I can think of nothing that is smarter and more caring than that.
Your friend,
David
Marc Kielburger and Craig Kielburger are co-founders of Free the Children and Me to We, co-hosts of National We Day. At twenty-eight and twenty-five years of age respectively, they are among the youngest individuals to be invested into the Order of Canada. Free the Children is active in dozens of countries, building schools and educating children. Me to We is a for-profit social enterprise that sells socially responsible products and services and donates half its profits to Free the Children. National We Day is an annual gathering of thousands of young people in Ottawa, the nation’s capital. This event, like others in the country and beyond, is meant to spur young men and women to fulfill their potential as active citizens.