The Seventh Estate
The Me to We Scandal
Nathan Pentland
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You may have heard about Me to We, or Save the Children' as they were formerly called. It was a heartwarming story about a twelve year old boy, wanting to help the children in Kenya and all over the world to have a good education. But when did the lies, corruption, bribery and silencing start? Was this a scam from the start or was it turned by greed and money? Find out now on this edition of the Seventh Estate.
It all starts in beautiful Thornhill, Ontario. Craig Keilburger, age twelve, sees the immense poverty and lack of education around the world. He decides to take action, creating a charity called Save the Children that will help build schools around the world. This goes on for a while, until Craig’s brother, Marc joins in and they change the name to Me to We. Then things explode. Massive donations start rolling in from schools to the Michael “Pinball” Clemons Foundation. “Me to We“ then starts selling different lifestyle products ranging from bracelets/necklaces to bars of chocolate. They also stage multiple rallies named “We Day”, where celebrities flock for the chance to perform. My question is how did they get enough money to do this? Seems more like the Super Bowl than something a charity would do.
Fast-forward to 2020, when a new political scandal arises. The Canadian prime-minister’s mother was paid by the charity to make an appearance at We Day. This government controversy causes donors to start wondering about where their money went. One of the more prominent donors, Reed Cowan, who fully funded a school for $12 000 CDN in honor of his son, Wesley, was shocked to learn that the commemorative plaque placed on that school in honor of Wesley, was taken down and replaced by another plaque of another donor who funded the same project. In an interview, Marc Keilburger claimed that it was a “tragic mix-up” and then goes to shift blame to the operators in Kenya. After being questioned by MPs and Reed Cowan, the We charity releases numbers towards how many schools were built in Kenya. The number: 360 schools and school houses. This may seem like a lot to you, but donors were led to believe that approximately 900 schools were built with their money according to the Fifth Estate.
The Fifth Estate, a Canadian television news investigation program, started looking into the messages that donors were sent from We charity. They discovered that the We organization had sent a picture of one school to one donor, then sent a picture taken at a different angle of the same school to another donor and so forth. Taylor Conroy, who worked with Change Heroes and Me to We, filmed himself in front of the same school thanking different donors for fully funding that school which is not what was supposed to happen. Despite this evidence, the governor of Narok county, Samuel Tunai, claims that We has done nothing but good in the Maasai region. He also claimed that “if you were to doubt the good work done by We charity, you are nothing but wrong”. He also said that he would not comment on the question about what he would do if there was more money that was not being given to the county.
In an attempt to seek the truth about the number of schools in Kenya, the reporters of the Fifth Estate set out to count the number of schools. When they arrived at the Motony campus, they were told on the phone by the governor that their presence is not welcome. They also visited the school that Watson Jordan, a Carolina teacher that had funded IRKT (Irkaat) 4 in the Irkaat village, and they discovered that it had been fully funded four times over. The discoveries just snowballed from there. In Irkaat, 28 schools were built, whereas donors were told that they had funded 70 schools. Then, they discovered that the school funded completely by a boy named Avery Skog, was also funded by RBC and Roots Canada. In Rongena, where Sko funded his schools, only 12 out of the promised 55 schools were actually built. Really makes you wonder if your college funds are safe in a bank that was scammed by two guys in a hockey arena with flashy lights?
The Fifth Estate visited the We College/Office campus and talked with a We charity executive. She claimed that donors knew that their money was being pooled for bigger projects. The We executive claimed that the Fifth Estate’s mission to count schools “is misguided”. The Fifth Estate later learned that, in fact, that’s what the We charity was doing all throughout the investigation: counting schools. The new number that was provided by We was 862 buildings built in Kenya. Now, mind you, this number is impressive, but latrines, sheds and barns also inflate it.
The Fifth Estate then reached out to Rukshan Dasilva, who funded a school in Kenya for a class project. As it turns out, the school that Dasilva funded with his classmates was also funded by others, including the Michael “Pinball” Clemons Foundation. Dasilva also disproved the claim that donors were told their money was pooled, saying that he and his classmates were never told that. It appears that the We executive is lying about the good done in the region.
An anonymous source later reached out to the Fifth Estate. The source said that selling the same school was “the norm” for the Keilburger brothers and that to them it was “free money”. Another source, who agreed to chat on WhatsApp, claimed that the overselling of the schools was a purposeful act and that “what the brothers wanted was more important than how they went about it”. What the brothers wanted appears to be monetary gain.
The same source leaked documents to the Fifth Estate. The documents contained a spreadsheet that contained proof that We had sold the same school for 10, 12 and even 15 thousand dollars to various donors. Also, there were notes in the margins about the different celebrity donors. These notes included the following: “Richard Branson (Virgin Atlantic), not a problem since they have not asked the status of the project.” and “Gabby Gorbani, tricky, so a project not yet built might be something we have to commit to.”
The evidence compiled against Me to We is pretty large, but time will only tell, as more and more information is revealed. Maybe think about how Me to We has impacted you. Maybe you helped sell chocolate or the bracelets or maybe you went to We Day. Think how many times We charity duped everyone around you. As a closing note, the Seventh Estate suggests that you do your research when it comes to donating to charity this holiday season. That’s all for this edition of the Seventh Estate.
Source: The Fifth Estate
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