- For Our Daughters, Wednesday, Nov. 23 at 7 p.m. at Vancouver's Vogue Theatre. Tickets: $30/$20, visit www.voguetheatre.com. Info: www.forourdaughters.ca.
SHANNEN O'Brian is on a mission to help young women in Ghana reach their full potential.
Through her grassroots non-profit organization Create Change, which she founded in 2007, the West Vancouver native has given more than 20,000 people access to clean water and supports 1,000 girls on an annual basis to attend high school and university.
Now, O'Brian, who splits her time between Vancouver and Ghana, is reaching out to the wider community, interested in encouraging, and making it easy, for community members to likewise do good.
"There is so much that one person can do . . . .," says O'Brian, 29. "Every day there is something that you can do, whether that's for a local cause or whatever, that can make a difference. And, we start realizing that we are not powerless to create change, we have a lot of opportunity to do it and it's just about getting behind something that we believe in and moving that forward."
A Sentinel secondary grad, O'Brian went on to complete a degree in international development and volunteered in a number of countries around the world, as well as worked for three years in Ghana.
"I saw that the issue of high school is something we don't talk about enough, or the issue of higher education in the developing world, we don't focus on enough," she says.
Instead, getting kids into primary school is often the focus.
In Northern Ghana specifically, young women are left out of the education process due to their primary role viewed as helping with labour in the home, with water playing a big part in that. Hence, O'Brian decided to found Create Change, a charity focused on providing clean water and putting girls through high school. Starting small, the reach of the organization has continued to snowball. O'Brian now has nine staff members in Ghana and in addition to its main mission, the nonprofit has renovated and re-equipped seven primary schools and conducted classroom building.
While she hopes to expand Create Change to other countries, it will maintain its grassroots feel. "We have all local staff, everyone that we work with, it's very personal," says O'Brian. "Rather than growing that organization to become very large and bureaucratic, we would then start working with other small grassroots similar types of organizations in other countries."
Seeing the positive impact of Create Change, O'Brian wanted to come up with a means of keeping it sustainable. She was troubled by a statistic she heard: members of the general population give less than one per cent of their disposable income to charity a year, which everyone fights for, both local and international causes.
"I was trying to think of ways that we could fundraise that would allow us to tap into the 99 per cent of the other disposable income that we're spending on everything else," she says.
"If we were given the opportunity to give with our regular purchases, which we do every day, that's kind of a win-win for everybody," she adds.
This prompted her to launch Karma Exchange earlier this month, a local fundraising social enterprise centred around a web portal, www.karmaexchange.com.
Karma Exchange offers users the opportunity to bid on auctions, and purchase Groupon-style deals as well as other featured products. Partial proceeds go to Create Change or to the business' specific Karma project (like a clean water initiative). Not only does the site give people an opportunity for their purchases to make a difference, it also speaks to the increased demand on businesses to be socially responsible. "What's really neat about what both Karma Exchange and Create Change does is they really link, whether it's the donor or the business, with something tangible and specific, and that was something that was really important to me. Not only to keep us honest as an organization, but so that people know exactly the change that they're making when they give. I think that charities don't offer that enough for people," says O'Brian.
To raise awareness of Create Change, O'Brian has arranged for four women from rural areas in Ghana, Beatrice Didongo, Faiza Saaka, Fayudatu Yakubu and Gladys Sayibut, 19-20 in age, who were aided by the organization to graduate high school, to spend Oct. 15-Dec. 7 in the Greater Vancouver area sharing their story. The For Our Daughters Speaking Tour has made numerous stops in and around Vancouver, including Victoria and the Sunshine Coast. On the North Shore, those involved have visited Collingwood and Braemar schools.
"Really, we're trying to create awareness about the discrimination that girls face in the developing world, not just in society but in the education system specifically," says O'Brian.
In addition, she wants to put a more accurate face on those affected. "I think people, often we have these images of what those people would be like, they would be different than us, they would be skinny with flies on their faces, what have you. Whereas the girls that I deal with everyday are just absolutely so capable and the potential that's being wasted when they have to drop out of school and are forced into marriage at 15-16 is colossal. (It's) really having an enormous effect in not just Ghana but many countries in terms of their ability to develop because girls are left out of the decision-making process, girls are left out of the education system."
The four young women plan to attend university next year with the further support of Create Change. Members of the public are invited to hear them speak at a public event, For Our Daughters, Wednesday, Nov. 23 at 7 p.m. at Vancouver's Vogue Theatre. Ticket proceeds will support Create Change. Live entertainment will also be provided by The Boom Booms and The Reckoners. For more information, visit www.createchangenow.ca.
