Rio Lindo students hold ‘Fair for Fairness’

Students from Rio Lindo Adventist Academy hosted their first
‘Fair For Fairness’ last Sunday raising $1,600 for local and
international charities.
Almost all of Rio Lindo’s 145 students participated, running
booths and collecting donations to help the REVO club, a
student-led club on campus, with their mission to raise awareness
of slavery and injustice in the world.
“The big picture that I want participants to take away from this
event is that there is slavery and there are still people that are
enslaved as property, 27 million people, and no one seems to know
that,” David Kabanje, founder of REVO at Rio Lindo said.
The clubs’ goal was to raise $1,500 for the International
Justice Mission, IJM, a worldwide human rights organization working
to end human enslavement and trafficking.
“It is about $500 in legal fees to free someone who is enslaved
and about $1,000 for someone being enslaved as a prostitute,” said
Steve Martin, Community Services Coordinator at Rio Lindo who is
sponsoring Kabanje for his REVO project.
The event also collected shoes for Soles4Souls, a relief effort
that donates shoes to people in need, along with clothing for two
local organizations, SAY, a Sonoma County youth and families crisis
intervention organization and Open Table, an outreach program for
homeless.
“We aren’t looking for people to give loads of money, the only
thing I want them to take back from this is, there is a person out
there that needs attention more than themselves and to be aware of
the world around them,” said Kabanje.
The idea for Fair For Fairness came about last year after
Kabanje met a student from a university REVO club and decided he
wanted to create the first REVO club at the high school level.
REVO, short for revolution started on a college campus in Hawaii as
a way for students to raise funds and awareness for causes they
believe in.
Kabanje was impressed by the way students could get involved
with global issues like slavery. He said that over the years at Rio
Lindo all of the pieces began to fit together and he finally
recognized the higher plan that was in store for him. He decided it
was time to put his plan in motion.
“We’re tired of talking about change and not doing anything
about it,” said Kabanje. “They say we’re the next generation of
change and our students have a sense of what’s happening in the
world, but we want to start creating progress in the world.”
Kabanje is a senior at Rio Lindo and is looking forward to going
off to college. He hopes that REVO will continue to be a club at
Rio Lindo and that the Fair For Fairness will become an annual
event.
“If we can love each other and help each other and if we can
actually do that, the world would be a different place,” said
Kabanje.
For more information on how to get involved with IJM, visit
http://www.ijm.org/
Staff Writer Robin Hug can be reached at Ro***@hb*****.com.