iCAN Team

The challenge

The On the Edge Trust (OTE) provides youth-for-youth leadership development as well as opportunities for young people to use these skills to take action in their communities. “Young people’s energy is never-ending,” says 24-year-old Ben Irving, OTE’s founder and manager. “If we’re asked, if we have the opportunities – we give 110%.”

The response

OTE provides these opportunities through a combination of leadership forums for high school students and, most importantly, community action. Last year, when young leaders were challenged to come up with a low-cost, high-impact initiative to meet community needs in the greater Wellington area, they noted the increased demand on food banks, and ‘iCAN youCAN weCAN’ was born.

Why not get students collecting canned food? And how about beating the Guinness world record for the largest canned food structure as part of the process? The result: 20,000 students collected 54,725 cans of food, with the resulting structure (pictured) beating by 9,000 cans the previous record set by San Francisco architecture students. More importantly, recipient food banks received up to four months’ worth of food to distribute.

Since then, iCAN collections have been held in Auckland, Hamilton, Christchurch and Dunedin, and the concept has been extended to other community action projects, such as giving blood and running street collections.

How the Todd Foundation helped

The Todd Foundation provided three years’ funding to OTE to support its first-ever paid worker as well as administration costs. “We were doing good stuff before on a voluntary basis, but it’s hard to build momentum without someone full time to coordinate things. This funding has made it all possible – a really nice dream has become a larger reality,” says Ben.

What they say about it

“Because of my involvement with OTE, I’m much more confident about contributing my ideas and helping people; I understand what I can offer,” says 18-year-old Bryony Cunningham-Pow from Wellington East Girls’ College. “Getting involved with iCAN was an amazing thing. We jumped into groups, came up with ideas and we all worked to evolve it. And just about everyone wanted to be involved.”

Ben agrees. “We find something that is of real value to the community; add good music, good friends and a good feed – and anything is possible.”