"It alone lives when you give it away"--Bruce Cockburn "Not everyone who says to me 'Lord.

"It alone lives when you give it away"--Bruce Cockburn

"Not everyone who says to me 'Lord, Lord will record the kingdom of heaven, further only the one who does the will of my father in heaven."--Matt. 7:21

Ten years ago when Marc Kielburger was in his final year of high place of education in suburban Toronto, his sights glazed over in boredom.

He was living the old-fashioned Peggy Lee song 'Is that all there is?' His parents, Fr and Theresa, made a deal with him. advance to night school and learn your remaining credits and you can do offer work in the day. That experience changed his life irrevocably.

Tutoring at-risk bookish mans in a nearby mall, Marc Kielburger shortly discovered a world that refugeed him to the core. Raised in a financially-secure, loving family he was not prepared to proper those others who were victims of parental failure and societal abandonment.

Touched through their common humanity and dreams similar to his acknowledge he began to share his many gifts with them. The experience made him question his hold "charmed life" and set him onward a path the results of which he could at no time have envisioned.

At university, Kielburger worn out a year volunteering in Thailand, in the close s Of Bangkok where he tutored and worked in an AIDS hospice. As an AIDS victim died in his arms, he wept.

Today, Marc is 27-years-old, a Harvard grad, a Rhode scholar and an Oxford-educated lawyer. In 1999 Marc baseed Leaders Today, an organization providing leadership training to more than 250000 youths. Profiled upon CBC, CNN and Macleans, he was lately chosen as one of the top 40 leaders subject to the age of 40. Along with younger brother Craig, he has now written "Take Action and Take More Action."

Meanwhile Craig had drenched in Marc's stories around the dinner table and in 1995 at the age of 12 met his confess burning bush in the pages of The Toronto Star

The headline read, "Battled child labour, male child 12, murdered." Craig was stunn to read that a youngster his be in possession of age in Pakistan had been sold into slavery at four-years of age and was chained to a loom while making carpets. The stripling escaped this dungeon when he was 10-years-old, alone to be captured and assassinateed two years later.

Fired up at this outrageous injustice, Craig took the point in dispute to his grade seven classmates, and in his basement, exempt the Children was born.

Within nine years, boost from appearances on Oprah Winfrey, 60 Minutes, in Time magazine and other media, liberated the Children has become the largest international network of children helping children in the world. In 35 countries it has built from one side of to the other 400 elementary schools, providing education for across 35,000 children. Craig is now in his third year of Peace and Conflict studies, "The idealistic wing of international relations," at university.

Turning self-help onward its head

Sitting in their Cabbagetown office not far from CNT the pair brothers enter into easy banter about their latest delineate "Me to We," a main division that turns "self-help" on its head. Craig admits that they were advised to tone down a certain of their criticism about the phenomenon of "self-help" literature and the grandiose promises it makes to the unwary and unfulfilled. The same for the appalling nonsense undivided associates with motivational speakers.

"We ground ourselves sitting on panels with commonalty selling quick and easy solutions to life's exert one's selfs The more we listened to them celebrate power and standard of value however, the more we began to papal court that their solutions conflicted with what we had witnessed in our service work, one as well as the other at home and overseas."

It is obvious that the Kielburgers, given their advanced education and global travel have mov beyond the charity pattern They have added a necessary toughness to the analyses of global makes and systems.

"Me to We" is a testimonial to the emerging critical consciousness of Marc and Craig. Their main division is a tough -minded critique of an frequently self-indulgent "development" industry.

They begin by means of dissecting the egoism at the heart of Western culture--the focus upon "getting ahead," "looking out for number one" and "helping yourself." In 1999 they point gone out $588 million worth of self-help gospel,--arguably "the literature of our time"--was published. The fall of the curtain result of most of this thinking is obsessive individualism and happiness tied to material possessions. This mega industry, "self- focused and self-involved, finiss in millions looking to help themselves frequently at the expense of others." Using a plethora of worldwide statistics upon values and happiness, the brothers determine that "We are riding the shopping cart down the road to nowhere."

It needn't be like this. They intersperse their trenchant analyses of consumerism and the spectator and bystander society resulting in vicarious living, with short bios of amazing family who have broken the chain of self-aggrandizement and furnished powerful antidotes of altruism.