Philanthropy Among the Rising Generation

When the eldest grandchild was about 16 he got his cousins together and they came to us and they said you know we want to give back too we want to have our own project in the foundation Philippe and I were thrilled and I said to them I said you realize that means no more Christmas presents no more birthday presents no more of these presents that we give you because now we're going to take that money and put it into your project yes yes yes we all agree I said you also know you have to work at it oh yeah we're there we’re going work at it we're going to help fine so I wanted to take a little project they took a big project we want to take bees I wanted a bee hive at the country, they floored us, they said we want water. Water? Philip and I were like what we live in Canada we have all the water we need Ah they suggest you have the quantity of water, yes Canada has 20% of the world's fresh water but not the quality you don't know what's going on and we didn't we didn't so we started right then to start studying about water we were both very curious and I had a little more time than Philippe so I said okay I'll take this one on with the grandchildren and they said we want this to be about young people we want this to be about Tech they were very clear on what they wanted they're young but they're bright your kids are bright just give them a chance I really mean it so I was like okay so we started on this and in that time we now do what we call aqua hacking and this is hackethon that we had studied other ones that were done over the weekend they don't really do much so we do a 10 month hackethon and what we do is we go to municipalities or to groups who have issues around water they have the issues not us so the municipality will say we'd like you to look at sewage overflow or we'd like to look this latest one was on how much salt we put on the road So we go to the universities and we've worked with most every University across our country and they we will put out on a website what are the issues we always have about 4 or 5 issues kids will sign up yes I'm interested in this one yes I think I have a way of solving this they will form either their own teams or we will help them form their teams then we'll give them help with IBM as 1 of our partners then we put them with design teams because these kids don't know about design then we teach them how to pitch because they don't know how to pitch they've never done that because we have started 17 companies in the 5 years they are working in 10 major issues around water and we've touched we've brought into our group over 2000 young students and some of them are older their PhD doctoral students and they have Incredible incredible ways of solving these issues.