The next major milestone in the WE movement
The WE Global Learning Center opens its doors
The WE Global Learning Center is the brand-new, state-of-the-art hub for the WE movement. It’s helping to inspire schools, youth groups and families across Canada to change the world. It provides students and educators from coast-to-coast-to-coast with the tools and resources they need to learn more about causes they care about and take meaningful action.
The WE Global Learning Center opened its doors with an official ribbon-cutting ceremony on Sept. 27, fulfilling a vision that has been many years in the making. The project began over three years ago, during a morning walk shared by businessman and philanthropist Hartley Richardson and the WE movement’s co-founder Craig Kielburger across the Maasai Mara, in Kenya. The two dreamed of a dedicated space for young people to come together and gain new skills on their journey toward action. What the WE Global Learning Center has become, however, has surpassed both of their wildest dreams.
Through state-of-the-art technology in the centres’ Global Classrooms, schools and youth from Canada and around the world—including those in rural and rural Indigenous communities—will gain access to service-learning resources and the virtual coaching they need to make a difference at home and globally.
This building wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the incredible community of people who care. The WE Global Learning Center will enable tens of thousands of young people—from Ottawa, Kanata and Nepean, Ontario—to interact directly with their counterparts in Kenya, Ecuador or India—and everywhere in between.
Housed in a beautiful, heritage-certified building, the facility includes the WE Connectivity Hub, cutting-edge Skype classrooms, and the WE Incubation Hub, where youth from across Canada and around the world can receive mentorship to create their own charities or social enterprises and experience leadership and service-learning programming firsthand.
We were also honoured to welcome Ban Ki-moon, the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations, as our special guest at the WE Global Learning Center’s opening. Mr. Ban held office for nearly 10 years between January 2007 and December 2016. From climate change and economic upheaval to pandemics and increasing pressures involving food, energy and water, Mr. Ban mobilized world leaders around a set of new global challenges and has sought to give voice to the world’s most vulnerable people.
The opening of the WE Global Learning Center represents the next major milestone in the WE movement, but is more than just the new WE headquarters. It’s a place for everyone to come together, learn about the world and make doing good, doable.
The WE Global Learning Center was made possible by the generous support of the Hartley Richardson family, the Richardson Foundation and David Aisenstat, as well as the Gilgan family, the Modesto and Filomena family, the Rumi foundation, and the Losani family. A special thank you to corporate partners the Royal Bank of Canada, TELUS, Microsoft, Siemens Canada and Cisco.