Chuck Duboff and Tasha Carriere Spillett are Human Rights Award Winners
December 10th is international human rights day. Each year the Manitoba Human Rights Commission, Canadian Human Rights Commission and Manitoba Association of Rights and Liberties jointly sponsor a Human Rights Awards Luncheon to recognize community members who had worked hard to promote human rights in the community. Two awards are presented at this time – the Adult Human Rights Award and the Dr. Sybil Shack (a human rights promoter who died and left some of her fortune towards this award) Human Rights Award to a young under 30 years old. In addition to a plaque, the award comes with, a presentation of $500 to the winner. This year there were two awards handed out, one to an Aboriginal Youth and the other to a high school English Teacher. His name is Chuck Duboff.
For the past 12 years Chuck has been Coordinating the Maples Collegiate Unity Group. They organize marches against racism, unity dinners and last year for the first time, the group organized a “Rock Against Racism“ concert to raise funds for immigrant serving agencies concert at which more than 2000 participants attended. It was only $2.00 entrance fee.
In accepting the award Chuck said that the Unity Group started in response to angry reaction by some immigrant youths to one of our Reform Politician statement in 1989 when he said that we should put immigrants on a carpet and send them back where they came from. Some students were angry and went to Chuck, their teacher and asked what they could do. He said he told them they could write letters. They did that and got back a generic response. They were not satisfied; they asked what else we could do. He said he told them that back in the 60’s if something like that had happened they would have marched with pickets. They said that what they were going to do. Those kids marched 12 kilometers from their school to the legislative building with placards with words like, “stop racism”, “Promote human rights” “unity in diversity”. Then they decided that this should become an annual event. He volunteered to be part of the group and to keep it going. This group has won several awards in the City of Winnipeg. Today there were two exchange students from Germany who was part of the ceremony. They said when they returned to Germany, they’d like to form a group like this to welcome everyone and promote unity.
Isn’t that wonderful? The work in this group is done voluntarily through extra curricular activities by the teacher. He gives his time and today he was rewarded for that. He could hardly get his words out in the beginning so touched he was.
The young woman who received the other award, Tasha Carriere Spillett, is only 17, and is a role model in the Aboriginal community. She has given more than 600 hours of volunteer work to get the ground United Against Racism started. She facilitates anti-racism work, and says she plans to do much more work in the future because it is important. She said all we need to do is to respect one another and work together for change.