This year, Shaw is awarding 10 Grants of up to $5000 to schools with ideas that best encouraged empathy, inclusivity and respect.
Seaquam Secondary student Abhay Sachal is one of this year’s Shaw Youth Grant recipients.
Abhay’s Break the Divide program connects youth across Canada and the world to promote social inclusion and break down stigmas about Indigenous communities while actively involving youth in the process of reconciliation.
Students come to learn about issues affecting the local community such as quality education, inequality, climate change, intergenerational trauma, and food insecurity. Shaw’s grant will help expand the program by providing technology to new partner schools and to create an app to provide a modern and easily accessible way for students to connect.
“Bridging communities together by sending kindness one on one, is a thoughtful idea! Creating an app to ensure that it is as efficient as possible takes an epic idea to the next level!”
– Meisha Watson, YTV personality
Earlier in November, Abhay, along with his brother Sukhmeet, gave an online lecture to the University of Kassel in Germany about their social justice work with Break the Divide. They spoke about the role climate change plays in issues regarding food security, specifically in rural Canadian communities.
Abhay writes about his experiences and motivation continue this powerful work in a blog post for the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE)
Learn more about Break the Divide