The following is an interview with I Can Go Without‘s Paul Rowland on their collaboration with OnexOne for the Million Meals Campaign.

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1-Give me a short summary of Million Meals Campaign and the OneXOne Foundation.

The Million Meals Campaign has been created to raise awareness about food insecurity in North America—there’s a lot of kids going to school without the necessary nutrition for them to start the day. In the Northern Territories of Canada, food prices are ridiculously high: bottled water can cost around $88 and a cabbage comes in at $28.

Onexone managed to create a solution to help solve this problem. They pulled together various sponsors that supply food and logistics, the money they raise goes towards this, so the actual cost to deliver a healthy breakfast to one child is one dollar. 

2-What I Can Go Without do, and how are you helping with the campaign? What sort of impact do you see yourselves making?

I Can Go Without has been chosen as the official partner and fund-raising platform for the event and subsequent fundraising after the event.

We are the only organization that gives 100% of donations to the charity, no strings , no gimmicks.

We believe in projecting positive messages of success stories via our mobile application and web platform. We provide transparency and explain how your dollars are spent, keeping donors informed with updates. We strive to monitor and share open source knowledge about charities’ fundraising activities so we can gauge how efficiently they spend their money.

Our key message is that you can make a difference with tiny acts, like skipping a coffee or sharing a lunch. That small act can actually provide around one week of health breakfasts for a school kid who needs it most.

Our network amplifies the message via friends and colleagues, so that a solitary act of charity suddenly gets pushed by the micro-donation (butterfly) effect.

We hope to build positive habits into the every day lives of conscious consumers who wish to make a difference in the world, but had previously struggled to feel that their efforts made a difference.

3-What sort of engagement have you already gotten? How did you get Simple Plan and Kardinal to sign on?

Onexone have had support from major stars at their shows over the years including the likes of Larren HIll and Bono. Kardinal is a regular supporter of Onexone and their great causes.

For Simple Plan, we just reached out to friends and family around the music industry to search for possible acts and since I used to be in the music industry for many years, I was able to contact Simple Plan and pitch the Million Meals concept. So far we have had great support from Kardinal and Simple Plan, they are really doing their bit to talk about the cause. They have reached out to their fan bases and the excitement is building, tickets are getting few and far between, but we do have some special tickets available for your readers who are from Ontario. They can claim some at www.icgw.io/millionmeals.

4-Is this something you’re looking to replicate—any future plans along a similar vein?

Yes, we are currently in talks and actively working on some big concepts that are planned for 2014 and 2015, these shows will be major scale shows with crowds of up to 200,000 people. The main thing is you wont be able to attend the party unless you’re giving back or helping in some way—we’ll keep you posted on that.

5-Leave me with why I must read about this campaign.

You must read about this because the future of giving is evolving, and there will come a time when giving back is like doing recycling—it’s gonna be in our daily habits. We will be informed, empowered, and connected, these types of communities will be mobilized to solved problems via various forms of actions like advocacy, donations or volunteering.

We can no longer rely on governments or massive NGO’s to take on the challenge themselves, its our turn to all take responsibility, and I Can Go Without is the new wave of that conscious consumer action!