Local Action and Global Imagining: Youth, International Development, and the Walkathon Phenomenon in Sixties’ and Seventies’ Canada*.

In the late sixties Canadian young people drew attention to global humanitarian crises through the relatively recent innovation of the hunger march. At its peak of popularity, the Miles for Millions walkathon functioned not only as a fundraising tool but as a consciousness-raising vehicle around issues of global significance, including famine, poverty, and war. Children and youth played both symbolic and material roles in the emergence of international development politics and praxis and were fundamental to making the walkathons a spectacular fundraising success. The Walk helped hundreds of thousands of young people imagine themselves belonging to a transnational community in which children mattered. At the same time, imagining global connections between children and youth became intrinsic to Canadian students' sense of nation that insisted on the importance of the country's response to international need. Empathic, emphatic, idealistic, and at times naïve, Canadian youth met the challenge of the Miles for Millions walkathon and were responsible for the millions of foundational dollars raised for the era's international development projects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]