Grand Forks Keep The Beat
Date: July 6th, 2007, 12:00 - 24:00
Location: Ozeroff Village, approx. 3 km west of Grand Forks. Same location as the Solaris Music Festival.
Organizers: Andrew Robinson, Kate Russel and Nicole Muscroft.

Keep the Beat is a 12 hour music festival raising funds in support of War Child Canada. War Child Canada is an independent charitable organisation working across North America and around the world to assist children affected by war and to raise awareness for children's rights everywhere. Keep the Beat is a fun activity designed to raise awareness and bring together people at the same time for a good cause. To do this though, we need the support of the community. We are looking for both volunteer help and donations (be the financial donations or items that could be prizes) from around the region, along with artists who are wanting to play some music for such a great event.

If you would like more information, please feel free to email us at gfss_ktb@hotmail.com.

Keep The Beat By: Laura Savinkoff
Grand Forks youth are hosting an event to bring awareness to the below facts on behalf of an organization, War Child Canada, that goes into war torn areas to try alleviate the suffering of children. As with all peace and social justice groups they function on donations of time, energy and scare dollars. When financial donations are many the staff gets paid and if not, well, then all the monies are used to help children and their families survive the holocaust of bombs and bullets; the destruction our tax dollars support. Keep The Beat is a music marathon combined with other activities, from noon to midnight July 6 at an event called Solaris (at the Ozeroff Village—watch for details). The Boundary Peace Initiative will be there to support our youth to extend a hand of respectful friendship to our global brothers and sisters. Join us for the whole event or an hour or even 30 minutes, drop a few dollars into the kitty to show your support of youth concerned about the world we are leaving them, the destruction they will need to clean up and deal with.
Facts from War Child:
There are more that 30 wars raging around the world right now.
In the past 10 years, more than 2 million children have died. 12 million have been forced from their homes, 5 million have been disabled and millions of others have been psychologically scarred by war.
Over 90% of the casualties of modern warfare are civilians and more people have died because of war in the 20th Century than in the entire history of the world.
In 2005, the world spent an estimated $992 billion on the global war machine. Compare that figure to the fact that in 2000 the UN estimated that it would cost a mere $60 billion a year to: reduce world hunger and poverty in half; reduce the number of child deaths by 2/3s; completely stop the spread of AIDS and other communicable diseases; send every single child in the world to school.
In countries where children are already vulnerable to malnutrition and disease, the onset of armed conflict can increase death rates up to 24 times.
Of the 17 countries with over 100,000 AIDS orphans, 13 are in conflict.
Weapons that can be categorized as small arms are responsible for 90% of the deaths which occur during conflict. In some countries guns as large as AK-47s, which are capable of firing between 34-50 rounds per minute are available for as little as $6.
There are over 300.000 soldiers in the world who can be classified as child soldiers. The three top offending nations for the use of illegal soldiers are Columbia, Thai-Burma border and Northern Uganda. In the case of Northern Uganda, 90% of the rebel forces are under the age of 15.
Nearly 1/3 of all wars are either directly or indirectly linked to trade in natural resources.
For more info contact: Andrew Robinson, Kate Russel or Nicole Muscroft by email: gfss_ktb@hotmail.com