AT A COFFEE SHOP on Elgin Mills Road just west of the 404, I’m meeting fundraiser, author and UN ambassador Bilaal Rajan. His prowess for rallying donors for various charitable causes all over the world, from typhoons in Burma to Aids in Africa, has garnered him much media hype. He’s been called a fundraising phenom.
His mom tells me over the phone that he’ll be there any minute, and like clockwork he appears, riding his mountain bike down the sidewalk. He’s wearing a striped hoodie, skateboard shoes and a knapsack. He is, after all, only 12 years old. His mother asks me not to keep him too long — he needs to be back home in time to study for his math test.
Luckily, this coffee shop is across the street from the Richmond Green Sports Complex, and since Rajan doesn’t like coffee or tea (yet), and happens to have three baseball gloves in his knapsack (“Two rights and one left, just in case,” he says) we head over to the park.
Rajan says that although he finds math easy, he still has some things he needs to learn for his impending test. He’ll need his math, too, if he wants to realize his goal of becoming a neurosurgeon and an astronaut, or, as he wonders aloud, “the first neurosurgeon in space, yeah.”
But if he’s up in space, what about his organization, Hands for Help, the public speaking, and travelling the world with UNICEF?
“I’ll do that too. I don’t want to be tied up in an organization and I don’t want to be doing it for a profit,” he says before excusing himself to race down a hill on his bike, crouched over the handlebars as if in a bobsled race.
Rajan started fundraising when he was just 4, selling tangerines door-to-door to raise money for earthquake victims in India after his father read him a story about it in the paper. Next he was selling cookies for hurricane victims in Haiti. He raised roughly $6,000, after which UNICEF signed him on to make presentations to school kids about how they could make a difference. His turning point, however, came in 2004 when he issued the Canada Kids Earthquake Challenge, asking each Canadian child to raise $105 for tsunami victims. A total of $1.8 million was raised, which the federal government matched dollar for dollar.
By that point, there was no question that this was a kid (8 years old at the time) that the world ought to take seriously.
His most inventive endeavour came when Rajan unveiled the Barefoot Challenge. He went shoeless for an entire week to draw attention to the hardships of children in developing countries.
He has since been to Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malawi and Tanzania to see first-hand the results of his efforts. Last year, at 11, he received Canada’s Top-20 Under-20 award.
Now he is sitting on his bike, watching a baseball game and talking about his book, Making Change: Tips from an Underage Overachiever, released last October.
“I basically just talked into a recorder, it was transcribed and edited,” he says. The book advance went to setting up a leadership award given to a middle school student who accumulates the most community service hours, he says. Just then the sound of a baseball connecting with an aluminum bat echoes across the field. Rajan cocks his head, searching for the ball.
Surely it must be tough for a kid with such weighty responsibilities to be, well, just a kid. But Rajan seems to take it all in stride. He flashes a toothy grin, showing off his braces with green elastics. He mentions that he’s on the ski team and the tennis team.
“Actually, I was on the tennis team for two years, but then I got cut,” he says. It turns out the final cuts this year were during Rajan’s Barefoot Challenge. “They wouldn’t let me on the court without shoes, but it was worth it for the cause, I guess,” he says, before quoting FDR’s famous saying, “There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still.”
Just then, following the ring of a bat, a baseball goes soaring over the fence. “Wow, home run!” he yells.
He suggests heading over to the skate park around the corner.
A park staff truck is driving away from the skate park by the time we get there, causing Rajan to stop his bike in its tracks. “That’s the guy who locks the gates to the park,” he says quietly, watching the truck as it drives around the corner. “But technically, it’s not even dusk yet. A lot of kids actually just throw their bikes over the fence. I could probably do it with a BMX bike, but my mountain bike is too heavy.”
After carefully reading the rules and regulations posted on the locked gate, which mention nothing about criminal charges or trespassing, I offer to aid and abet Rajan with the bike situation. Within seconds he’s tearing around the park, up and over the ramps with the excitement of well, a 12-year-old who just snuck into a skate park.
Abandoning the measured cadence and adult-speak of a politician that he has the tendency to conjure up whenever he’s in front of crowds or the media, he hurriedly blurts out story after story involving biking-related accidents at summer camp in the Muskokas.
He then rides up a ramp, dismounts his bike, and demonstrates with his hands how one of the local kids is able to jump his bike. “Some of the guys are really good, but not me. I suck,” he says.
But then again, Rajan doesn’t get as much time to practise because, as he puts it, one needs to prioritize.
“It goes school first, and then work, like if I have to answer an email or something, and when time is left I go out and play or hang out with friends. A lot of the time I don’t get to just go out and play though,” he says, shrugging. Just then a group of older kids in baggy clothes toss their bikes over the fence and start to ride around.
“You know what I like about it here?” he asks. “It’s a good community, so I’m not afraid to go ask those guys how to do those things, even though they’re big and scary. It’s really just the clothes they wear.”
By then it’s already too late though, and very little time is left for Rajan to study. We start to make the walk back.
“Sorry I didn’t bring a bike for you,” he says, sincerely. I tell him that it’s for the best because I would only hurt myself.
“That’s okay if you get hurt; that’s the fun of it,” he says. “If you’re not risking anything, then you’re not learning.”
Spoken like a true 12-year-old.
But she possesses certain qualities that should scare any company or store dealing with her: She has patience and she won’t back down. (Once, she waited on the phone on hold with a telecommunication company for 97 minutes to complain about something.) As she says, “I’ll deal with the customer service representative from hell.”
“We love it,” says Doane. “We have space for the kids, and it’s just a beautiful place.” At the cheerful Mocha Mocha café (489 Danforth Ave.), we stop in for a drink and browse a menu of hearty, homestyle options.
In keeping with the kid-friendly theme, this Type also offers an entire “kids’ lounge,” which caters to the younger set with storytelling, art classes and workshops.
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Post City Magazines’ parenting columnist, Erica Ehm is the voice of yummy mummies with her playful website 