Kids-in-Crisis - Hero Kids

My Hero Project

MY HERO is a not for profit educational web project that celebrates the best of humanity. Their mission is to enlighten and inspire people of all ages with an ever-growing internet archive of hero stories from around the world. MY HERO uses current web technologies to provide a unique educational experience that promotes literacy and cross cultural communication.

At this site, you will find information about many, many of the people who went over and beyond to do something special. We strongly recommend that you take a look at the Hero Children's page of the site to learn more about what great kids just like you, your peers, are doing to help make the world and the human condition better!

Angel in the Outfield - Eddie Garza

People Magazine, May 31, 2004
by Thomas Fields-Meyer and Siobhan Morrisey in Homestead.

Teen Eddie Garza brings baseball – and hope – to the children of migrant workers.

When Eddie Garza drives up the South Dade Labor Camp in his SUV, he’s like a Pied Piper on wheels. Kids of all ages emerge from their homes – a drab collection of cinderblock boxes – and chase after him through the camp’s narrow roads, yelling, “Eddie! Eddie! Eddie!”

Garza, 18, greets each one by name. The son of former migrant workers, he grew up near camps like this one in Homestead, Fla., where seasonal and migrant workers, mostly of Mexican descent, pick fruit and vegetables and make their homes. On visits throughout his childhood, Garza noticed that the children of the workers spent much of their free time sitting around bored. “The kids had nothing to do; the playground was dangerous,” he says. “It had no swings. The slide had a big hole in it.” So Garza, an ace outfielder on his high school baseball team, decided to take action. In August 2001 he started a free baseball camp, offering the labor-camp kids instruction in batting, fielding – and fun. “Through baseball,” he says, “I can teach them many things.”

Lesson 1: There’s more to life than picking produce – a powerful message for kids facing significant obstacles to success. Armando Bustos, 13 is typical of Garza’s players. One of three children of Mexican parents, he was among the first to enroll in the baseball camp. “It helped me stay off drugs and off the streets,” says the sixth grader. “It’s better to do something than to do nothing.”

For his first camp, Barza borrowed $350 from his parents for T-shirts and scrounged gloves and hats from friends. Though 20 kids had signed up, only 11 showed. “We were like the Bad News Bears,” he says. “I learned to be very patient.” He preserved and now runs three weeklong camps annually for around 25 kids aged 7 to 15, funded by $500 in donations. “He does this almost without any fanfare,” says Patrick Snay, headmaster of Gulliver Preparatory School inn Pinecrest, Fla., where Garza is a senior with a B-plus average and a varsity right-fielder. “He’s reticent and shy. He really feels it’s part of his lot to help other people.”

That altruistic drive came in large part from his parents. Born just north of the Mexican border in Texas, Cipriano Garza, Jr., 56, one of nine children, traveled to 34 states picking produce with his own parents. Tough few of his peers complete high school, Cipriano went to college on a track-and-field scholarship now runs the Migrant Education Program for the Miami-Dade County public schools. In 1981 he married Mexican-born Maria, 44, the youngest of five children of migrant workers who, in the 1970s, lived at the same South Dade camp where her son now teaches baseball. She, too, defied expectations by going to college, eventually becoming a labor activist to help people like her parents. “Eddie hasn’t fallen far from the tree,” says actor Edward James Olmos, who met the Garzas in the early 1980s and is Eddie’s godfather. “These people have not only sacrificed their lives but have given to the community they’ve come from.”

When Eddie first brought up the idea of starting a baseball camp, however, his father was skeptical. “I told him these people get lied to all the time,” says Cipriano. “If you’re going to do this, you need [to make] a commitment.” Cipriano has no doubts now. Like his parents before him, Eddie has been an inspiration to brothers Cipriano III, 14, and Alex, 13, who have started another baseball camp. But Eddie has no plans to abandon his own when he goes to the University of Miami in August. “No money can make up for the joy these kids give me, he says. “The biggest reward is the smiles on their faces.”

Craig Kielburger – Founder of Free the Children

Free The Children is an international network of children helping children at a local, national and international level through representation, leadership and action. It was founded by Craig Kielburger in 1995, when he was 12 years old. The primary goal of the organization is not only to free children from poverty and exploitation, but to also free children and young people from the idea that they are powerless to bring about positive social change and to improve the lives of their peers.

Free the Children is unlike any other children's charity in the world, as it is an organization by, of and for children that fully embodies the notion that children and young people themselves can be leaders of today in creating a more just, equitable and sustainable world.

About Craig

Craig first became a spokesperson for children's rights when he was 12 years old. Searching for the comics in the local paper, a front-page article caught his attention. He read about a young boy from Pakistan who was sold into bondage as a carpet weaver, escaped and was murdered for speaking out against child labor. Craig gathered a group of friends and founded the organization Free the Children.

Craig, now 21 years of age, has traveled to more than 40 countries visiting street and working children and speaking out in defense of children's rights. He frequently addresses business groups, government bodies, educators, unions and students around the world. He has advocated on behalf of children in meetings with political and religious leaders including Prime Ministers and Presidents, CEOs of major corporations, Pope John Paul II, the Dalai Lama, Queen Elizabeth II and the late Mother Teresa. Craig’s work has been featured on major television programs in North and South America and Europe, including CNN, the Oprah Winfrey Show and 60 Minutes.

Craig’s first book, Free The Children was published by Harper Collins in the United States and has been translated into 8 languages. Craig and his older brother Marc, a Rhodes scholar currently studying at Oxford, have co-authored ' Take Action – A Guide to Active Citizenship for Youth’ which was released in February 2002 by Gage Educational Publishing.

Free the Children has grown into an influential international children’s organization with hundreds of thousands of young people in more than 35 countries participated in its activities. Youth members of FTC have raised funds for the construction of more than 400 primary schools in the rural areas of developing nations, providing education every day to over 30,000 children. They have distributed approximately 175,000 school kits and in excess of 5 million dollars worth of medical supplies to needy families. FTC currently supports portable water projects, health clinics, alternative income cooperatives and primary schools in 21 developing nations.

FTC’s advocacy campaigns have led Canada, Mexico and Italy to pass legislation in order to better protect sexually abused children. It has lobbied, in addition, corporations to adopt labels for child-labor free products. Free The Children was selected in 2001 by the United Nations and The Office of the Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict to be the lead NGO coordinating youth outreach for the decade of peace and non-violence towards children.

In 1999, brothers Craig and Marc co-founded Leaders Today. Teams of trainers travel to schools, communities and religious groups to host academies designed to empower youth with the leadership, teamwork, effective communication and self-confidence skills needed to become active global citizens. To date, Leaders Today has provided leadership training to over 300,000 young people throughout North America. In addition to its domestic leadership programs, Leaders Today operates summer and march-break trips for youth interested in volunteering in India, Nicaragua and Thailand, as well as leadership/ volunteer retreats to its own centers in Kenya and Arizona.

When he was eight years old, Christian Miller decided to make a difference in the fate of an endangered species - the sea turtles native to the beaches near his home in Palm Beach, Fla. Shortly after his family moved there in 1984, Christian found a baby sea turtle dead on the beach. In his search for answers about the small creature and why it had died, he contacted the states Department of Environmental Resources, and soon became the youngest person ever to be trained to monitor and protect these imperiled amphibians!

"The best reward", he says, "is seeing the turtles crawl toward the ocean and swim away." But Christian, now 17, has received other rewards, too. He was recently named a finalist in this years Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and he has addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York as part of a U.N. Environmental Programs Global Youth Forum.