At-risk Vancouver students fundraising for Kilimanjaro climb

These days, it seems like the best way to get up Mount Kilimanjaro is to fundraise your way to the top. There are charity climbs for everything from Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, and heart disease to children's rights and orphans with HIV.

But let's not be cynical about every donation-supported effort to ascend Africa's highest peak.

Eighteen disadvantaged students, many of them aboriginal, in the Streetfront Alternative Program at Vancouver's Britannia Secondary School are the latest folks seeking your help. From the Street2Peak website:

The Streetfront Alternative School and Britannia Secondary are embarking on a trip that will change the lives of 18 current students forever and will inspire and motivate any who get to hear their story. In March of 2015 the Street2Peak Project will take these 18 students to the upper highlands of Tanzania in order to climb Africa’a highest peak – Mt. Kilimanjaro. This trip is just the first in an ever-evolving series of expeditions that the Street2Peak students will participate in over the next decade. The purpose of these trips is to give disadvantaged students an opportunity to share their stories of struggle and success with the rest of the world. We are going to travel the globe and expose our students to those wondrous and beautiful lands outside of our inner-city borders. They will get to meet, firsthand, other indigenous youth from different countries and start to participate in a global conversation about what it’s like to be a kid in an ever-changing and overly complex world. In so doing, we will be creating a leadership cohort that will take their experiences to students around the province, inspiring youth to believe in themselves and know that it doesn’t matter where they come from – what matters is where they go.

According to a Vancouver school board news release, the trip will involve Grade 9 and 10 students and cost an estimated $160,000. 

If you are moved to donate to this effort, you can find more info on the Street2Peak website.