An example: League's partnership with Absolute Leadership
Realizing that one day, the children and grand-children of our Member-Partners will not have to work and struggle just to put food on their tables, League is providing a way for them to experience and internalize the value of work, money, and most importantly, contribution.
League has partnered with Absolute Leadership (www.absolute.org), a not-for-profit organization with a sustainable operational model. Through its activities, Absolute matches Canadian teenagers needing a life’s purpose with impoverished individuals in Third-World countries. This results in life-altering experiences that provide purpose and meaning for the first group, and direly-needed homes, schools, clinics and other essentials for the other.
Currently, Absolute Leadership visits some 360 high schools and delivers live presentations to some 500,000 Canadian teens every year—reaching a larger audience than does the MuchMusic television station The events combine live bands, multimedia presentations, and impassioned testimonials from the Absolute road crew to demonstrate to students that their young lives do have value and purpose. To underscore this fact, they’re shown just how much better they have it than people living in undeveloped countries. At the presentation’s end, audience members are invited to find their life’s purpose by making a difference in the lives of others less fortunate by taking part in an Absolute Leadership Hero Holiday.
Hero Holidays take place four to six times per year. They are 10-day “volun-tourism” trips to the most impoverished areas of developing nations. Approximately 100 teens at a time are flown to these communities, and there they build homes, schools, and clinics (often for refugees living in dump sites). They play with and comfort physically deformed orphans, and they become involved in an array of other life-changing (for them) experiences.
Each evening they return to their resort hotel a few miles from the slums they worked in that day. It is here that the contrast in the quality of life between the two groups is driven home. In these emotional evenings they get together and reflect on the experiences they shared that day, compared with the privileges they take for granted back home. When these teens return home they are absolutely changed. Their lives have more meaning and purpose, and they’re now better prepared to do something meaningful with their lives.
League’s founders are currently Absolute’s principal supporter—along with Home Depot and the Jet Blue airline company.
League’s founders support Absolute Leadership so it can continue to expand its program of improving the lives not only of those living in impoverished communities around the world, but also the lives of thousands of Canadian teenagers—the future of our nation. Providing funding today will ensure this program stays alive until League’s own home-grown Intergenerationally Wealthy teens can go through the Hero Holiday program themselves. For they will one day need experiences like these to instill in them the compelling desire to help others.
