WE Charity

Our vision is to shift the world from “me" to “we."

Our mission is to empower all people to change the world, locally and globally, achieving transformative outcomes for themselves and others.

We empower change with resources that create sustainable impact. We do this through domestic programs like WE Schools, WE Day and internationally through WE Villages.

With WE Schools we're reigniting the fundamental purpose of education: moving students to want to learn, preparing them with the life skills to better the world and empowering them to forge their own paths to success.

WE Day is the manifestation of the WE Movement, an ocean of people coming together to create impact. Standing in a stadium full of change-makers will reaffirm the belief that a better world is possible. WE Days aims to motivate and inspire young people to become change-makers in their local and global communities.

Internationally, through WE Villages, we support people in building up stable, thriving communities that give them the power and dignity to support themselves.

For two decades, WE Villages has been engineering an international development model to end poverty. It works. It's proven. It's scalable. It's not a handout or a single solution, but a combination of key interventions that empower a community to help themselves.

WE Schools:
WE Schools receive curricular resources, service campaigns, professional development for educators and mentorship programs to help students become change-makers.

WE Schools resources are free to schools and always evolving to keep the learning materials fresh and relevant. For teachers it revitalizes their class, the curriculum and everyone's passion. The WE Schools program reminds everyone what classrooms are supposed to be: vibrant, bubbling incubators that inspire tomorrow's best leaders.

WE Day brings together world-renowned speakers and award-winning performers with millions of young people and families to celebrate and inspire another year of incredible change. Youth can't buy a ticket to WE Day - they must earn their entry by taking action on one local and one global cause.

WE Villages:
Our core mission is empowerment. In North America, we empower people to create positive change around them. WE Villages applies the same philosophy in developing countries, when our local staff work with rural villages and regional governments to support, teach and empower people within our five Pillars of Impact.

These are our five Pillars of Impact that lead our WE Villages to true independence:

Education
When children are educated, they are armed with the courage and self-confidence to better themselves and their families, their communities and the next generation. They learn how to prevent illness and improve overall health, build and maintain infrastructure, manage personal and professional relationships, understand and advocate for basic rights and secure a livelihood.

Water: clean water and sanitation
Improving access to clean water is one of the most crucial and quickest ways to lift a community out of poverty. It reduces illness, allows girls to go to school instead of bearing the responsibility of fetching their family's water and leads to better agriculture and access to food.

Health
Families who have access to health care can run farms, keep their families fed and their children in school. They can pull themselves out of the grip of chronic illness, and eventually out of poverty.

Food: agriculture and food security
We work with communities on programs that promote food security and improved agriculture, like school gardens and irrigation projects. We provide families with better access to healthy food and surplus food to sell, empowering them to grow strong.

Opportunity: income and livelihood
Children can only attend school if their parents have the financial means and time to invest in their education and basic health. So we teach parents, often mothers, skills such as animal husbandry to help them generate income, accrue savings and ensure sustainability. Through a mix of engaging the local government and developing alternative income programs, we help our WE Villages partner communities reach a level of self-sufficiency within an average of five years.

In addition to its headquarters in Toronto, Canada, WE maintains regional offices across the U.S., Canada and U.K. to support our domestic programming and the extensive network of educators who bring our WE Schools service learning into thousands of classrooms. Permanent country offices in China, Ecuador, Haiti, India, Kenya, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone and Tanzania support our WE Villages communities.

WE's Board of Directors includes respected thought leaders from the business, non-profit, and academic sectors who bring innovative leadership and sound guidance to the governance of our organization.

WE Charity's capability to create change is powered in part thanks to stable funding through our innovative and unique relationship with our social enterprise, ME to WE. With ME to WE, we create products and experiences that allow people to do good through their everyday choices. Half of all ME to WE's profits are donated to support WE Charity, while the other half is reinvested to grow the mission of the social enterprise. This unique partnership with ME to WE ensures that WE Charity achieves a remarkable rate of financial efficiency, with an average of 90 percent of donations going directly to our domestic and international programs.

A long and diverse list of foundations; socially conscious corporations like Unilever, Microsoft, and Ford; and private donors have chosen to partner with WE to support our domestic and international work.

WE Schools impacts:

According to an independent, third-party study by recognized NGO research firm Mission Measurement, compared to similar peers, alumni of WE Schools are:
- 5 times more likely to self-identify as social change agents
- Nearly 8 times more likely to start campaigns to solve social problems
- 4.6 times more likely to be in a social justice related field of study or profession
- 2.3 times more likely to plan to pursue, or are currently pursuing, a career that will create social change
- 2 times more likely to report they volunteer at least once a week
- 1.3 times more likely to report they regularly vote in political elections

Nearly 1 in 5 WE Schools participants have started a nonprofit to create social change and over 25% of participants work with policy makers to address social problems.

WE Day impacts:

To earn their ticket to WE Day, young people in the U.S., Canada and U.K. have raised more than $45 million in support of over 1000 different charities and causes, given more than 14.6 million hours of volunteer service, and collected more than 5.6 million pounds of food for food banks in their communities.

WE Villages impacts:

We've built more than 1,000 schools and school rooms, giving 200,000 children the opportunity to gain an education. Plus, we've trained teachers, set up extracurricular programs and brought in basic school supplies

By installing hand pumps, boreholes, wells, pipes, hand-washing stations, rain catchment systems and latrines, we have helped one million people live in healthier, more productive communities.

Through clinics, mobile medical units and medical supply distribution, we've empowered tens of thousands of rural community members with the knowledge to prevent disease, seek medical attention and improve their families' well-being with healthy habits. Plus, we've provided over one million people with access to clean water and sanitation, which helps prevent diarrhea—a leading cause of death among children under five.

We've enabled farmers and families to produce more than 15 million nutritious meals to fuel their communities. Agricultural training increases crop yields and ensures drought-resistant crops.

As of today, 30,000 women have been provided with the tools for economic self-sufficiency. And this has had a direct impact on the health and welfare of their families and their communities. Enabling women, specifically, to become earners is smart economics—it improves the financial and health outcomes of the entire community.