1 event. 83 countries. 200,000 students. Welcome to WE Day Connect
Digital technology is bringing the stories, inspiration and community of WE Day to students around the world.
Months of preparation led to this day. And people around the world are waiting.
At the WE Global Learning Centre, in downtown Toronto, the mics are hot, the audience is humming with excitement and the WiFi is blazing fast. Meanwhile, teachers in 83 countries are logging onto WE.org.
WE Day Connect is about to start.
Its origin story goes back 10 years to the first WE Day. The big show was lights and music, performances, speeches and spectacle. But the real power wasn’t on the stage—it was in the audience, in the thrum of cheers and the electricity of anticipation. It was in the young people who felt a part of something larger.
WE Day has grown every year since, culminating in 19 stadium-sized events hosted around across North America and the United Kingdom. But students giving back with WE in more than 100 countries are searching for community. This is their story. In Ottawa, Joanna Harvey turns on the projector in her classroom while her Grade 6 students take their seats after lunch. 2,000 kilometres away, in the Atlanta suburb of McDonough, Georgia, students file past Dionne Gould into rows of chairs. In shows past, the educator would have students watch in their classroom, but with 350 of the school’s youth now engaged with WE, the group has taken over the library. Today, the previously silent repository of knowledge comes alive with energy.
They’ve blocked off the following morning to replay the show for their students, but it’s the live event that appeals to teachers Riya Jain and Neetu Dhiman. Gathered in front of their computer in Haryana, India—30 kilometres south of New Delhi— the pair are ready to join buzzing teacher forums chattering during the show.
WE Day Connect is the answer to the question: How do you reach students and teachers no matter where they are in the world? It translates the power of a live show into an online, interactive celebration of doing good and blasts it across wireless frequencies and through fibre optic cables into classrooms around the world. Hosted by ETALK’s L.A. correspondent and WE Day veteran Liz Trinnear, more than 203,000 people tuned in for in-studio games, videos from their favourite popstars and an inspiring speech from Martin Luther King III.
But the real draw is the students. Using Microsoft technology, WE Day Connect shares step-by-step stories about how young people turn passion for social issues into successful awareness and fundraising campaigns. Using WE Schools resources, teachers and students are given everything they need to tackle local and global issues from their classroom into the greater community.
All that inspiration left a mark, according to Gould, who capped the viewing off by challenging students to participate in a show-and-tell of sorts, sharing everything they had learned from WE Day Connect. “There were a lot of aha moments,” she says. “It changed my students, it opened up new doors for them.”
“For me and for my students, the most important thing is to see the impact of our actions and to see other kids involved,” says Joanna Harvey. The Manor Park teacher has taken students to WE Day for years, but tickets to the stadium-sized event are a hot commodity. In any given year there are around 80 students involved in her WE club, while only 20 make it to WE Day.
Knowing the impact it can make, Harvey turns her classroom into a viewing party for the day. The teacher pulls out the class WE Schools kit while watching, and students use it to brainstorm ways to pair the resources inside with lessons from the show for WE Schools campaigns like WE Walk For Water. “Hearing from children all over the world doing different initiatives, it spurred them to get more involved.”
We hear it all the time: the more we rely on technology, the less we connect as people. But it doesn’t have to be this way. WE is working with Microsoft to use technology to connect people. And it’s working.
One WE Day Connect event can reach more than 200,000 people—the equivalent of a year’s worth of WE Day attendees. And, because of Microsoft technology, the WE movement is spreading to places never dreamed of. Anthony Salcito, Vice President of Education of Microsoft, sees this as an opportunity for people around the world to bond over a shared passion for giving back. “We often think of technology as reducing our humanity, but it should be enhancing our ability to connect.”
No matter where you are in the world, WE is there.