Did Canadian “Friends” Spawn “Make Poverty History”?

Make Poverty History, the massive anti-poverty coalition that grabbed the world's attention through their "white band" campaign,  "click" commercials and "Live 8" concerts may have gotten their start thanks to a not so massive Canadian child poverty movement. Worldview, or Friends Canada as it was known at the time, was started by a group of friends wanting to encourage people to sponsor children.  

The original site was launched in the spring of 2004. Its main influence was a Chinese movement called Falun Dafa, that was run completely by volunteers. Falun Dafa taught a method of Qigong that spread incredibly quickly throughout China but didn't accept donations.

Friends used Falun Dafa as a model but with a focus on teaching about child sponsorship. It encouraged people to support the world's four major child sponsorship charities, and like Falun Dafa, it didn't accept donations and was run entirely by volunteers. Their slogan was the slightly radical "We Don't Want Your Money, We Just Want Your Heart"

Although it was very small, it received a lot of attention from some large international organizations including Oxfam UK, which later that year brought together the charities that would become the core group for the Make Poverty History coalition. With the slogan "We Don't Want Your Money, We Want Your Voice", funding from Bill Gates and with Bono as their international spokesperson, Make Poverty History launched on January 1st 2005. The original Friends website was voluntarily shut down because of the confusion caused by the similarity of the taglines but pages can still be viewed on the internet at www.teddysgarden.homestead.com/friends.html

Except for a woman at Oxfam who started the whole thing, nobody really knows how much influence Friends/Worldview had on the formation of Make Poverty History but one thing is for sure…Friends came first!

The current Worldview website www.worldview.ca features an animated virtual tour to teach about how child sponsorship really works, along with music videos contributed by sixteen artists from ten countries. In addition to watching their music videos, visitors to the site can also hear the performer's thoughts on child poverty.

Worldview connects to the international offices of Christian Children's Fund, Compassion, Plan and World Vision. It is not a charity and it still doesn't accept donations.

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