By Tanya Collier

Five local high school students traveled across the country recently to attend a workshop aimed at fighting child poverty in Canada.

The River Rural High School (RRHS) students attended Sharing Resources 2000, which subsequently developed a 50-paged document entitled The National Youth Report. The information compiled is being used as an action plan to stop child poverty by the 104 delegates who attended the session from Feb 8-14 in Banff, Alberta.

Amanda Cherpak, who attended a similar conference in Kemptville, Ont., said she and the other students joined national teams who openly discussed viable ways to have child poverty eradicated by the year 2000 in Canada.

Some of the many ideas included breakfast clubs, a regional conference to raise awareness in the area and the creation of youth clubs.

Scott Murchison said the efforts will be organized "by the youth for youth" without government involvement.

"We are doing it ourselves."

Students Nafay Choudhury, Sravani Prayaga and Aja Joshi, along with Cherpak and Murchison, applied to attend the event sponsored by the Optimist Clubs and the Internet Magazine TGmag. They raised additional funds needed through sponsors in the community.

Each student plans to revisit their sponsors to make them aware of the information they learned while in Alberta.

"We have a lot of ideas, we just have to put them into action," they told the Cape Breton post.

Prayaga said she wasn't aware how severe child poverty is throughout the country-especially that Nova Scotia has the largest number of children living below the poverty line. The students will be keeping in touch with the contacts they made while attending the workshop and will be meeting them again during a five-day conference to be held in Newfoundland May 13-18.

In July, they will be participation in a similar conference in Montreal.

Choudhury said the delegates he met while in Alberta did have different views from the Cape Breton students who were the only Nova Scotians to attend the event but "everyone listened."