Craig Kielburger

Craig Kielburger was born in Thornhill, Ontario in 1982. He is the founder of the WE Movement, which is a family of charities empowering people to help their local communities and to make a difference around the world. Kielburger received his undergraduate degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Toronto. He then went on to become the youngest person to graduate from the dual-school MBA program of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and New York University's Schulich School of Business, completing it with honors. Craig Kielburger has received several awards for his work, including the Nelson Mandela Freedom Medal, the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, and the World Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child. Kielburger became passionate about saving children from child labor when he was only 12 years old. Inspired by the story of a young advocate his age in Pakistan who protested against child labor in the country's carpet mills, Kielburger committed himself to the cause. He enlisted the aid of his brother and a group of classmates and they launched an initiative called Free the Children. They collected 3,000 signatures on a petition that demanded the release of Kailash Satyarthi, who was imprisoned for his activism against child labor and who later won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. Kielburger expanded the initiative further, eventually taking it forward to become the WE Movement. The WE Movement is an umbrella organization for WE Charity, which consists of WE Schools, WE Villages, and WE Day. It also consists of an environmentally-friendly and socially-conscious enterprise called ME to WE, which reinvests 50% of the profits from the products it sells back into the movement. WE Movement organizations run comprehensive educational and leadership programs, train teachers, generate public awareness campaigns, and bring community-based empowerment programs to help people help themselves out of poverty in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.