Journey to the Raising Sun

Changemaker: Graham Hunter May

GrassRoutes is a group of passionate youngsters with a slightly mad plan for empowering youth to protect their Environment: We are biking across Canada, presenting to youth groups from coast to coast, and raising money to help support their Environmental initiatives!

The Cause: Our journey is motivated by two core principals. First, we believe that our environment must be better protected from human impact. Second, we have seen first-hand that if youth are outfitted with passion, skills, and resources, they take leadership and work towards this change. To facilitate this, we are organizing youth events in every province we cross, to share our passion for sustainable living and teach skills in environmental leadership. We are also raising money through our journey to develop a Youth Action Fund. This fund will be used to help young people launch local, environmental projects in their own community. Finally, we hope that by sharing our story of sustainable transport across a continent, we can inspire environmentally-conscious living for Canadians.

The Journey: Our core team of five students are biking the full three-month epic across the world’s second biggest country, and we will be joined by other bikers for small sections of the way. We begin in Victoria, British Columbia in June, and travel east to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, for August 2011. The trip has been affectionately dubbed a ‘Journey to the Rising Sun,’ both for logistical reasons –like the sun in our eyes every morning– and for its quest to empower and educate young leaders for a better future.