Giving it all away
Deborah Ellis, 48
Author and activist, Simcoe, Ont.
This isn’t really a big deal for me. It really was a no-brainer. I was in the Afghan refugee camps in the 1990s doing a book of oral histories of the women there, and for me, there was no way I could do a book like that and keep the money. When I decided to write a novel about a girl in Afghanistan — The Breadwinner — the same principle applied. Since then, I’ve written oral histories and young adult novels about AIDS in Africa, drugs in Central America, children in the Middle East, children of soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, with royalties going to charities connected to each of those issues.
One thing that makes it easy is that I never see the money — it goes directly from my publisher to the charities. And the money is able to do things that I would never be able to do on my own — it funds schools and women’s shelters in Afghanistan, sends girls in Kenya to high school and more. That’s pretty cool.
When I do school visits, one of the hardest questions kids ask me is, “If the adult world knows these awful things are going on, why don’t they stop it?” I’ve been an anti-war activist since I was 17, and I come at this from the perspective that we have to do something to fix these problems. Giving the money away is one small way to do that.
I really don’t know how much I’ve given away. The tally a couple of years ago was around half a million dollars from the Afghanistan books, but I don’t keep track of it. And I don’t judge others who don’t give their royalties away — my life is unique and so is theirs. I’ve worked as a mental health counsellor and now coordinate an anti-bullying program in Simcoe, so I have enough money to live comfortably, but my needs are simple. And doing this work, hearing these stories has been a privilege: It makes me keenly aware of how lucky I am to be born in this day and age on this part of the planet, where women have more rights and freedoms than they have ever had.
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This article originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of More
