I was born in 1982 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. My father took a year off from teaching when I was four years old and we
moved to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic where I attended junior kindergarten in a local Spanish school. Upon returning to Toronto I entered
the French emersion program. At the age of eleven my family took another year off and we traveled throughout South East Asia. I believe that this early exposure
to the realities of our current economy, and the widespread poverty it has caused, was definitely a defining part of my life.
At the age of thirteen my family moved to a small town, a few hours from Toronto, called Picton. The transition from a city
of 4 million to a town of 4 thousand was a difficult one, at first. But in time I grew to feel like Picton was my true home. To this day, when people ask
me where I am from, I always tell them Picton.
I moved to Montreal to attend McGill University at the age of nineteen. I started my program in the Sciences, studying Biology, but after two years of this,
I realized that I did not intend to spend the rest of my life with a lab coat on. I decided instead to take a year off and move to Norwich, England.
It is here that I got my introduction to serving. After six months in England I moved to Cairo, Egypt, where my father was teaching at the time. Cairo opened my eyes to the wonders of
history and the monumental accomplishments humanity is capable of. We built the pyramids! Surely we can do anything.
I returned to McGill, this time to study the Arts. I received my Bachelor's in Anthropology with a minor in Psychology. During my final three years at McGill is when I started to form the
idea for the Alternate Economy. It seemed in all of my courses that were talking about development, the professors would always speak of
"development in the third world" with a sense of bitter defeat. It seems that no matter what initiatives are tried, they ultimately fail. Either
there is not enough money to see the project through, or the money is given to the wrong people and ends up spirited away to Swiss Bank accounts, rather than doing any actual good.
This got me to thinking. What is required for a community to stand on its own two feet? Access to cheap resources is necessary. But so is the education
to use those resources in the most efficient way.
After 9/11 and the resulting wars and economic collapse which ensued as a direct result, I began to ask the question "why?" Why do we keep giving money to same
corrupt leaders and call it aid? Why are we giving money to leaders at all? Why are we giving money, when it is education and resources that people need? And who is giving this money? The most important question of all.
It soon became clear that the answer to all of the first questions was tightly wound with the answer to the last question. It is the governments who give the money to the corrupt leaders as aid. But it is the banks that give the money to the governments.
And it is the banks that receive the money back from the corrupt leaders. So what at first appears to be aid, is in fact just the banks transferring money from one corrupt government account to another.
I have to admit that in my misguided youth, my solution to this problem was to become a millionaire and form a bank of my own. Once I had control of a bank I could start buying up resources,
buying off governments and making some real changes. As I get older I realize that becoming a millionaire is probably not going to happen. Not while I continue to work as a server waiting tables in a restaurant.
I also realized that this idea was not about one person saving the world. This idea was about humanity lifting itself up from the ashes and creating something
truly beautiful. This idea was about everyone.
It has been eight years in the making, but the Alternate Economy is finally starting to take shape. It is a huge idea and it will take a lot of people to put it into action.
But as I look around the world and see so much unnecessary suffering, I can't help but feel it is an idea that is long overdue.
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