Craig and Marc Kielburger

Craig and Marc Kielburger are the founders of Free The Children, a unique children’s rights and youth empowerment organization. Since its founding in 1995, Free The Children has become the world’s leading youth-driven charity, inspiring an entire generation to stand up and have their voices heard.

With the involvement of more than a thousand Youth in Action Groups, Free The Children has built more than 500 schools throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, providing daily education to more than 50,000 children. Through its Adopt a Village development model, it has established more than 23,000 alternative income projects to assist women and their families in achieving sustainable incomes.

Free The Children’s latest initiative is a joint project with Oprah Winfrey’s Angel Network called O Ambassadors. It is an unprecedented program, designed to educate and inspire over one million young people across North America to become socially engaged and take action to help their underprivileged peers overseas.

Craig and Marc are also the founders and directors of Me to We. The goal of Me to We is to encourage ethical living and social responsibility, while also helping Free The Children achieve financial sustainability. Me to We includes international volunteer travel programs, a publishing house, a music label, leadership workshops, a speakers’ bureau and a clothing line. Last year alone, Me to We worked with over half a million people and some of the best-known companies in the world to make social change as easy as buying an organic fair trade T-shirt.

Craig has a degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Toronto and is youngest-ever graduate of the Kellogg-Schulich Executive MBA program. He has received seven honorary doctorates for his work in the field of education and human rights and has traveled to more than 50 countries, visiting underprivileged children and helping with humanitarian projects and development initiatives.

Marc graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, having completed a degree in International Relations. He won a coveted Rhodes Scholarship and went on to complete a law degree at Oxford University with an emphasis on human rights law. Marc has also received two honorary doctorates for his work in the field of education and human rights.

Craig is the author of Free the Children and Craig and Marc are the co-authors of national bestsellers Take Action!: A Guide to Active Citizenship, Take More Action, the New York Times bestseller Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World, and most recently The World Needs Your Kid: How to Raise Children who Care and Contribute. They also have a syndicated columnist carried by the Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun and the Huffington Post, as well as for Canada’s most widely-read women’s magazine, Canadian Living.

Craig has been awarded many national and international awards for his work, including The Roosevelt Freedom Medal, The World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child (often called the Children’s Nobel Prize) and he is one of the youngest recipients of The Order of Canada. Craig’s work has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, 60 Minutes and The Today Show and in People, Time and The Economist.

Marc has been awarded many national and international awards for his work, including one of the youngest people in history to be awarded the order of Canada. Marc was recently selected by the World Economic Forum as one of the 250 Young Global Leaders. His work has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Colbert Report, CNN, BBC as well as many other news and print media.

He is the co-author of national bestsellers Take Action: A Guide to Active Citizenship, Take More Action, the New York Times bestseller Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World, and most recently The World Needs Your Kid: How to Raise Children who Care and Contribute. With his brother Craig, Marc is a syndicated columnist carried by the Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun and Huffington Post as well as for Canada’s most widely-read women’s magazine, Canadian Living.

Marc has been awarded many national and international awards for his work, including one of the youngest people in history to be awarded the order of Canada. Marc was recently selected by the World Economic Forum as one of the 250 Young Global Leaders. His work has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Colbert Report, CNN, BBC as well as many other news and print media.