Imagine flipping through The New York Times and landing on one of the ubiquitous stories about suffering and poverty in some small, undeveloped country. Would you read it with the familiar troubled-but-resigned attitude with which most of us normally process current events, or would you rip out the article and launch an international effort against social injustice?

That is exactly what Craig Kielburger, who spoke in Kennedy Hall's Call Auditorium at Cornell, Sept. 10, did at age 12 after reading about the assassination of Pakistani child laborer and activist Iqbal Masih.

In 1995, Kielburger, now 25, founded Free the Children, an organization that has built more than 450 schools and educated some 40,000 children in 50 developing countries to combat child labor through education. In a lecture sponsored by the Iscol Family Program for Leadership Development in Public Service, Kielburger spoke on "Me to We: Finding Meaning in a Material World." The lecture was presented in collaboration with the Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise Speaker Series, which seeks to encourage social entrepreneurship at Cornell.

Kielburger told students in the audience not to get overwhelmed by the scope of the problems in the world, but to focus on specific issues they care about. For example, it was during a trip through India, Thailand, Bangladesh and Nepal that Kielburger, then 12, began to understand that education was the key to fighting child labor. So when he founded Free the Children at his home in Thornhill, Ontario, that year, he focused on building sustainable schools in areas where poverty and suffering are most prevalent. But he "started with bake sales and car washes and pop-bottle drives."

Kielburger noted, "The challenge facing our generation is to make the worst forms of poverty, the poverty that affects 1.1 billion people, to make that poverty history."

He said that while $15 billion is spent each year on perfume, $5 billion would be enough to establish universal literacy; the $14 billion spent annually on ocean cruises exceeds the $10 billion necessary to provide clean water for the world's population. "While economy and industry are becoming globalized, we haven't yet globalized our compassion," he added.

All issues surrounding poverty, hunger, disease and child labor, he said, are interconnected -- families send their children to work because of drought and other results of global climate change, for example. Kielburger exhorted students to look at the world holistically and to understand that "schools, women's micro-cooperatives and clean water systems" may seem like separate projects, but all form one solution to child labor.

He suggested that Cornell institute a community-service requirement and begin a program of repayment-in-service, where students who work in public service are forgiven loans.

"There are more than 20,000 students on campus," Kielburger marveled. "That is an army. So next time you pick up the newspaper and see that article that troubles you most, make that issue your own."

Chandni Navalkha '10 is an intern at the Cornell Chronicle.