About me
From a young age I wanted to explore. Specifically, I wanted to explore space. My grandfather gave me his telescope before I was a teenager and I would read any books on space that I could get my hands on. I entered high school in my home town of Thunder Bay, Ontario with the aspiration of joining the air force as a military pilot in hopes of using this as an entrance point for astronaut training. However, later in school I developed myopia which would prevent me from ever becoming a jet pilot. I took a year off from school and travelled to Spain through the Rotary Youth Exchange Program. Having only lived in Northern Ontario, the opportunity to experience the history of civilizations both past and present in Europe showed me how much there was to explore and experience on our own planet. When I returned home, I made a point of finding a university program that could send me abroad again.

Following high school, I entered the International Development Co-Op Program at the University of Toronto Scarborough. The program incorporated a one year placement with any international organization with operations outside of Canada. I signed on with Canadian based organization Right to Play which coordinates community level sports programming for war affected children around the world. My year-long placement with Right to Play brought me to Uganda and Sierra Leone where I had the honour of meeting brave individuals with the courage to help those in their communities, people like Esther. I returned to Canada forever changed by the people I had met. I wanted to introduce those community leaders to the young people in my own country and to those in high school who, like me, may not have had the opportunity to see both the wonder and pain that exists in the world and challenge the status quo earlier in life than I could.

I began to speak publically to high school students in 2006 through the Canadian International Development Agency and on behalf of Right to Play. That year I also had the privilege of being one of two Canadian youth selected for a two year term as Goodwill Youth Ambassadors for the United Nations Office of Sport for Peace and Development. In this role, I was charged with introducing Canadian high school students to the Millennium Development Goals, and the current state of global poverty. During these two years I was brought on board with international children’s rights organization Free the Children as a motivational speaker for their Millennium in Motion tour. In 2007, our tour reached over 40,000 students in 100 high schools across the country. I met many inspiring young people with a heart and vision for global change through local community actions.

Having completed the tour with Free the Children, my mind continued to dwell on Sierra Leone and the community leaders like Esther that I had met during my time with Right to Play. Stephen and I decided it was finally time to begin work on finding a way to support these leaders by bringing their drive and determination together with the desire for change we had seen in those from our own society. What easier way to bridge the globe than through the internet? This commitment to starting Esther’s Echo was the first step in our journey, and our current progress is what you are now seeing online.

I still enjoy astronomy and would love to make it to space some day. But there are wondrous things I’ve seen in the efforts of those I’ve met in the most impoverished regions of the world; stars in the midst of dark places. I do believe, as Bono said, that God is with the poor, and that is certainly something I have come to understand. Esther’s Echo is a secular organization, but this work is my way of supporting those little pieces of heaven already existing in the world where most needed and following Christ’s call to be a leader by becoming a servant. From a young age I wanted to explore. Specifically, I wanted to explore space. My grandfather gave me his telescope before I was a teenager and I would read any books on space that I could get my hands on. I entered high school in my home town of... (more)