Drake

Leave it to a musician to make environmental activism look cool.

The Remix Project is a registered charity for the arts in Toronto that helps creatively gifted “at risk” teens and young adults, often from troubled or disadvantaged backgrounds, who don’t have the usual opportunities to fulfill their true potential. The various programs from music to business to photography better their lives and often give them a direction and career path.

Among the programs are Creative Arts with studies in graphic design, videography and writing; Recording Arts focusing on artists, engineering and production; and an entrepreneurial program called the Art of Business, which teaches participants about setting and reaching goals. This coming semester, slated to begin in September, will introduce both the Art of Photography and City Life Film programs.

“These young people are assets," says executive director and founder Gavin Sheppard. "It's up to us to figure out what it is they're best at and then help them realize it themselves, and then build the capacity to succeed in that.

"Drake's whole movement started here,” he adds as an example. “His producer [Noah Shebib a.k.a. 40] ran our recording arts program; his DJ [Future The Prince] is a graduate of our business program; his social media and graphics person [Karla Moy a.k.a. Hustle Girl] is a graduate of our creative arts program.”

Young Artists For Haiti, the Canadian collective of 50+ musicians which covered K’naan’s “Wavin’ Flag” to raise money for the victims of January’s devastating earthquake, remains at No. 1 on the SoundScan Hot Digital Songs chart for the fourth week in a row and has sold 80,000 downloads to date, just under 20,000 of those this past week.

Produced by Bob Ezrin, the man behind Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Kiss’s Destroyer and Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies, during the Vancouver Olympics last month at Bryan Adams’ studio, The Warehouse, the song features such artists as Avril Lavigne, Drake, Sam Roberts, Hedley’s Jacob Hoggard, Sum 41’s Deryck Whibley,  Broken Social Scene, Nelly Furtado, Justin Bieber, Kardinal Offishall, Metric, Simple Plan’s Pierre Bouvier, Colin James, Tom Cochrane, Jully Black, and K’naan himself.

“I got a call from Randy [Lennox, president] at Universal [Music Canada] and Bob Ezrin,” K’naan tells Samaritanmag. “They had this idea that they wanted to do something lasting, that actually educates young people in Canada about Haiti and not let the fatigue of the subject wash over everybody and everybody just forget Haiti.