Testimonials

When Krupa Kotecha signed up to participate in the Award, she had no idea it would become one of the most important influences of her young life.

“I got started with a friend as a way to fill my summers,” says Krupa, who is a Gold Award holder. “It became something that I really enjoyed and got really involved with. I really became committed to the activities that I used to facilitate the Award. It became a huge part of my life, in the end.”

One of the skills she started developing as soon as she started working on the Award involved television technology. She honed her skills, and in 2007 won a provincial Award for a monologue she wrote and filmed.

“It portrays the view of a brown girl being bullied and attacked because of her race by a group of white girls,” she says. “It’s from the perspective of the brown girl to show that despite all of our external appearances we’re all the same inside. We all feel the same when we are attacked like that.”

She says she’s never been the overt target of racism, but has been aware of racist attitudes from time to time. Her mother, however, is a Ugandan refugee who suffered institutionalised racism at the hands of former dictator Idi Amin.

“Amin encouraged and enforced racism against East Indians, so my mother had to leave Uganda – her home – because of that,” she says. “I’ve heard many stories from her.”

A self-described couch potato when she started the Programme, Krupa started doing yoga, jogging and playing basketball. She joined sports teams, something she said would have been unimaginable before starting the Programme.

And more importantly to Krupa, she developed a passion for volunteerism that she suspects will stay with her for the rest of her life.

“I had never really volunteered before,” she says. “Volunteering has been a huge part of my life since, and I really learned the importance of giving back to others. The Programme helped me gain all of that.”

Reproduced courtesy of The Globe and Mail, Canada.