As usual, the young people at Manitoulin Island’s two high schools are showing leadership beyond their years as they contribute positively not only to their own communities but internationally as well.
What a wonderful accomplishment for Manitoulin Secondary School’s SHARE/Go Green committee when they were able to announce the successful completion of their fundraising efforts that will build an entire new school in Haiti, especially when the announcement was able to be made on the sixth anniversary of the hurricane that devastated the Caribbean Island in 2010.
The original concept of a group of caring students to start such an organization (SHARE stands for Students Helping All ‘Round Everywhere) more than a dozen years ago was to look beyond local and national borders and do positive things in the larger world.
A story on the front page of this newspaper notes how, over the years, the SHARE/Go Green committee has also built a school and a well in Sierra Leone on East Africa and has provided assistance for students there.
Other young people, friends of a youth suddenly stricken with cancer, rallied quickly just prior to Christmas in support of the young man and his family, raising money to help defray expenses they will incur during travels to treatment over the months ahead and, as with the SHARE program at MSS, their efforts will continue to carry on.
Towards the end of 2015, students at Wikwemikong High School began a new initiative called SAGE (Sexual and Gender Expectations) just as, in recent years, MSS came to host a local chapter of the Rainbow Alliance organization.
Both groups are student run and led and their objectives are centred around issues of support and inclusion for young people whose sexual orientation may be different from the boy/girlfriend, girl/boyfriend model and also to educate their peers about the range of human relationships that commonly exist in the world in addition to the “standard model.”
These are only a few examples of youth leadership alive and well on Manitoulin Island but they are very significant ones that are very good indications that the future of Canada will, in not too many years’ time, be in very capable hands.
