New chair of Friends of the Orphans Canada wants to help disadvantaged children

Carmine Nigro is best known in Toronto as a developer and businessman. He has chaired the LCBO and Ontario Place, serves on the board of Invest Ontario, and is principal of Craft Development Corporation. But, he says, his newest role is the one that means the most to him: chair of Friends of the Orphans Canada, a charity that funds schools, clinics and homes for vulnerable children across Latin America. Nigro spoke with National Post about Fotocan and his role in it. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

How did you end up leading Friends of the Orphans Canada?

Approximately 20 plus years ago, in 1998, five of us got together and we had all done pretty good in life so we thought it’s time to pay it back. We were trying to figure out ways to pay things back and at the time one of our good friends Bill Van Haren had adopted a young girl from Guatemala.

We decided to take on a trip to Guatemala and see what was lacking there, and what we found was education was lacking. So we decided to go out and start building schools. When we started our group was called school friends.

After approximately three years, and maybe 15 or 16 schools, that were nothing fancy, just small educational facilities with two to three classrooms in Northern Guatemala and another place just south, in a town called Paramus, we connected with Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, which is our little brothers and sisters, a group out of Mexico that was looking to expand in Guatemala. They were looking for a group like ours that was skilled in the building industry, so together we acquired a property in this little town Paramus just near Antigua, and we worked together with them and we started Friends of the Orphans Canada (FOTOCAN) and that was approximately in 2004.

I was always just on the board of directors and it was this year that I was appointed as chair, and my goal is to mentor young people through adversity and education, to help them achieve their dreams. And I feel very strongly that if we can educate the younger generation, they’ll be self-sufficient‚ so teach him how to fish instead of giving him fish.

What exactly is Friends of the Orphans Canada?

Our vision is a world where we see disadvantaged children, including their families and other people in their community being embraced with dignity, compassion and opportunity by providing essential needs, food, shelter, education, health care.

We strive to create a nurturing environment, where we hope these young lives flourish and transform themselves through the education we provide. And it is not only education where they become a lawyer or a doctor, we have trade schools where we teach how to bricklay, do concrete work, fix small engines, do automotive repair.

What moments from FOTOCAN projects have stayed with you?

One of my proudest moments was when we started in 2004, we took on a project that would take 10 years to come to fruition. So every year we would go back to this same project, we would go in for two to three weeks, we worked night and day, and built it, and once the school was built we were out of there.

But my proudest moments was going back to Paramus, and seeing the first few schools and the dormitories, and to see the kids utilizing, the teachers teaching in the classroom that I built, that was my proudest moment.

There’s a photo of you playing soccer with kids on the website, what’s the story behind it?

When we would go down, we would actually live, eat and do everything, the kids did. We stayed on the premises, whether it was in tents or in the classrooms that were converted to two bedrooms for us. And we would organize games so that the kids could get to know us better, through soccer and through helping us work. So that’s the reason we were playing soccer, to build the camaraderie between them and us.

Have you witnessed difficult or tragic moments in this work?

We have a home in Haiti and on a regular basis, there’s kidnapping, not of our children, but of the women that are cooking for the kids and the school teachers, and trying to get them back is a big struggle. That’s been my biggest dilemma .

Do these kids remind you of your own immigrant journey?

100 per cent. The only difference is a lot of these kids, their parents either have mental health issues or their mothers are single moms who can’t handle these kids and so they come to our homes.

You’ve spoken about the importance of education, yet you didn’t finish high school. How does that shape your perspective?

To my mom and dad, education was assuring that, you know, we got out of this poverty because we weren’t lacking food, but before my mother bought me a pair of running shoes she’d have to think 10 times. So things didn’t come easy to me.

My parents thought through education, we can get a good job, become a doctor, a lawyer, dentist or something like that. And as immigrants that was their dream and I disappointed them by not finishing high school and going on to university. But later on in life, you start seeing things in a different light and I decided you know what they were right. My goal now is to try to educate as many kids as humanly possible.

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