Gala fundraiser offers hope

Last Saturday’s winter fundraising gala in Sydney to help reduce child poverty was a great step forward because the 850 attendees are living proof of how new technologies can raise all Cape Bretoners above poverty level living.

Their contributions netted an estimated $254,000 and was an important step in building a new coalition of togetherness to help poor children and their families learn to upgrade themselves.

No doubt some of the attendees are examples of the major job changes

in Cape Breton that have been underway since about 2007 when Moore’s Law forecast: “the expectations that the power of the microchips will double roughly every two years and continue on its path of delivering exponential growth in computing.”

But this is not happening just in Cape Breton. Around the world, this rate of change is “enabling the reshaping of virtually every man-made system that modern society is built on because these capabilities are being extended to virtually every person on the planet,” said Craig Mundie, the computer designer from Microsoft.

He also said “everything is getting changed and everyone is being impacted by it in positive and negative ways.”

No doubt many of the children of the gala fundraiser attendees are already, perhaps unknowingly, benefitting from the many acts their parents have undertaken to reinvent and reenergize Cape Breton in a thousand ways.

Therefore, the $254,000 netted on this occasion is early proof that collectively these Cape Bretoners realize their

own needs for interdependence can also help move many poor children and their parents up and away from their longtime, often poorly educated and overly subsidized past.

Hopefully, those funds will be invested so that these children and their parents can together enjoy learning how to read, write, speak and do math and science at increasingly higher levels. Jim Peers Sydney