Marc & Craig Kielburger (Marc and Craig speak separately)

About Craig Kielburger

   Craig Kielburger is the founder and chair of Free The Children, a unique children’s rights and youth empowerment organization. Since its founding in 1995, Free The Children has become the world’s leading youth-driven charity, inspiring an entire generation to stand up and have their voices heard.

   With the involvement of more than a thousand Youth in Action Groups, Free The Children has built more than 500 schools throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, providing daily education to more than 50,000 children. Through its Adopt a Village development model, it has established more than 23,000 alternative income projects to assist women and their families in achieving sustainable incomes.

   Free The Children’s latest initiative is a joint project with Oprah Winfrey’s Angel Network called O Ambassadors. It is an unprecedented program, designed to educate and inspire over one million young people across North America to become socially engaged and take action to help their underprivileged peers overseas.

   Craig is also the Co-founder and Director of Me to We. The goal of Me to We is to encourage ethical living and social responsibility, while also helping Free The Children achieve financial sustainability. Me to We includes international volunteer travel programs, a publishing house, a music label, leadership workshops, a speakers’ bureau and a clothing line. Last year alone, Me to We worked with over half a million people and some of the best-known companies in the world to make social change as easy as buying an organic fair trade T-shirt.
 
   Craig has a degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Toronto and is the youngest-ever student in the Kellogg-Schulich Executive MBA program. He has received four honorary doctorates for his work in the field of education and human rights. Now 25 years old, he has traveled to more than 50 countries, visiting underprivileged children and helping with humanitarian projects and development initiatives.

    He is author of Free the Children and the co-author of national bestsellers Take Action!: A Guide to Active Citizenship, Take More Action, and most recently, the New York Times best seller Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World. Together with his brother Marc Kielburger, Craig is a syndicated columnist carried by the Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun and Huffington Post, as well as for Canada’s most widely-read women’s magazine, Canadian Living.

   Craig has been awarded many national and international awards for his work, including The Roosevelt Freedom Medal, The World Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child (often called the Children’s Nobel Prize) and he is one of the youngest recipients of The Order of Canada. Craig’s work has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, 60 Minutes and The Today Show and in People, Time and The Economist. 

About Marc Kielburger:

  More youth inspirational speakers are available upon request.

Topics for Corporate Audiences (Addressed by either Craig or Marc):

1) What for-profit companies can learn from high-performing non-profit organizations
   Most non-profit corporations have no product, operate on small budgets, offer no benefits and pay employees low salaries. How then are they attracting and retaining some of the best talent in the marketplace? Why are so many recent graduates and seasoned employees moving into non-profits at the expense of the corporate sector? What can for-profit companies learn from nonprofit organizations in terms of resource allocation, staff retention, strengthening morale and building a motivated workforce? Craig and Marc Kielburger founded one of the most successful international non-profit organizations in recent history. They will share with you what your audiences can learn from the best practices in the non-profit field to help retain and inspire your staff, engage your customers and help your company become more profitable.

2) Me to We: How to help employees find meaning in a material world
   How can you find purpose in the workplace? How does a company inspire their employees to find meaning in the mundane? This speech will be an introduction to the powerful Me to We philosophy, developed by Craig and Marc Kielburger through more than a decade of humanitarian work. Me to We is the subject of their New York Times Best Seller which has already inspired hundreds of thousands of people and includes a specific emphasis on how to apply this philosophy within the corporate community. The speech helps to connect employees with your greater corporate mission and that of the world. The result is happier, more productive and engaged employees and dedicated, brand-loyal customers.

For Associations & Educational Audiences Me to We: How one person can make a world of difference    This speech provides an overview of Free The Children, from the organization’s beginnings, when 12-year-old Craig Kielburger reached for the comic section of the local newspaper, to a growing charity that has changed the lives of more than one million children around the world. This presentation is especially powerful for young people who are beginning their path to social involvement. Inspirational stories and important global statistics create a clear connection to how one person can make a world of difference. Young people will be equipped to develop their own personal action plan to make social engagement a regular part of their lives.