EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD Christopher Harriott has faced an uphill struggle in school. A shy boy lacking confidence, Harriott had to repeat grades in primary and secondary school and is 19 credits short of the 30 he needs to graduate from high school in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. But his life now appears to be moving in a more hopeful direction.

Through a program called Change Your Future, designed to aid visible minority and aboriginal youth, Harriott has joined a group of grade 9 and 10 students who need special help. Under the guidance of Sophia Moseley, one of the program's counsellors, he is learning new work habits and has developed a more positive attitude towards his studies. He is also receiving tutoring in math, the subject that has been his chief stumbling block.

Harriott first heard of Change Your Future last October, when he was selected as a candidate by his school and met Moseley. It didn't take him long to decide to join the program. "I really had to change my life around," says Harriott, "and Ms. Moseley was giving me a chance to do this." His mother, Sonia Grandison, thinks Change Your Life has made a huge difference in her son's life. "Sophia has brought him a long way," she says. "She believes in him. And Christopher is working harder, because he knows more is expected of him."

The program that is changing Harriott's life is one of a dozen provided by the Learning Partnership, a not-for-profit organization formed in 1993 to channel widespread business support for public education into focused programs for schools. The programs range from Entrepreneurial Adventure, which enables students to participate in small-scale business ventures, to Words on Work, which brings successful professional women into schools to talk to students about education and life choices. Some Learning Partnership programs operate in schools, others beyond the classroom. Round Table on Technology, for example, brings together educators, business leaders and others outside the classroom to improve the use of technology in education, and through the Creative Arts Learning Partnership, grade 4, 5 and 6 teachers attend ballet, theatrical and musical workshops and performances so they can develop a wider understanding of the arts and therefore be better able to teach their students about them.

Since its inception, more than a million students have participated in Learning Partnership programs. But until now, Take Our Kids to Work, which enables grade 9 students to accompany a parent or adult to work for a day, has been the only program offered outside Ontario. This year, however, the organization will begin to introduce more of its programs across the country, launching Words on Work and Entrepreneurial Adventure in a number of provinces by the summer of 2003. "Our aim," says Veronica Lacey, president and chief executive officer of the Learning Partnership, "is to make our organization truly national."

Working with an annual budget of about $3 million, contributed by businesses and individuals, governments, school boards and community organizations, the Learning Partnership has as its underlying goal the bolstering of public education. "We want to help make a contribution to enriching the educational experience of all kids in Canada," says Lacey. "Our programs are aimed at helping schools to produce high-achieving people who will lead successful lives."

Last year, the Learning Partnership gained an added dimension when it merged with the Collegium of Work and Learning, a not-for-profit organization that carried out research in public education and addressed policy issues. The merger, says Lacey, should help give more depth to the work of the Learning Partnership. "We see ourselves as championing vibrant public education," she says. "And our positions and programs need to be based on thoughtful research."

The Learning Partnership has won widespread support among educators and other Canadians concerned about the future of public education. John Evans, a former University of Toronto president who is now chairman of Toronto-based Torstar Corp., praises the organization for "striving to bring public attention to the importance of keeping publicly funded education a strong factor in our education system and trying, in a very positive way, to stimulate changes that will make the system better."

Imperial Oil has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Learning Partnership since 1993, when the company's chairman and chief executive officer, Robert Peterson, helped to develop its goals and operating principles. "I was delighted to get involved," says Peterson. "I've long believed the business sector should support efforts to enhance public education. Business needs a well-educated workforce. Education is so important to our country's future." Currently, Imperial's main link to the Learning Partnership is through Jim Levins, director of the company's safety, health and environment department and a member of the Learning Partnership's board of directors. "Much of the organization's focus is on areas like science, mathematics, technology and literacy," says Levins. "It's vital to develop students' interest in these subjects. Adeptness in these areas is key to the success of this country."

Vital, too, is making the connection between academics and the world of work. That's where Take Our Kids to Work comes in. A key goal of the program, notes Lacey, is "to get kids thinking about the careers they might pursue."

"We can tell kids how the skills we teach them in school will be valuable in later life," says Val Huber, a career-program assistant at Maple Ridge Secondary School in the town of Maple Ridge, just outside Vancouver. "But it's not until they actually experience a real workplace that they truly understand."

Huber has been involved in the program for the last three years and during that period has seen the participation rate at her school grow to around 60 percent of grade 9 students. At Maple Ridge, as at other high schools across the country, arrangements are often made so that students who cannot visit their own parents' workplaces can accompany other parents.

How do workplace visits affect students' ideas about their own careers? "Some kids come back saying, 'That's just the kind of work I want to do,'" observes Huber. "But others say the very opposite – they decide that what their parent does is something they definitely don't want to do. Either way, they're thinking about their future. They also learn the importance of interpersonal and communications skills in the workplace, and get a sense of what's involved in working."

Last November, Alyssa Emond, a student from Maple Ridge, accompanied her father, Donald Emond, to work. Donald drives and looks after the vehicles used by movie and television actors working in the area. On the day of her visit, he was working in nearby Burnaby, where Smallville, a TV show about Superman's childhood, was being filmed. Alyssa, 14, realized that her dad works really hard. "He has to do a lot of things himself," she says, "and at the same time keep track of what other people are doing."

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Veronica Lacey, president and chief executive officer of the Learning Partnership, explains that the goal of the organization is to contribute to enriching the education of all kids in Canada.

THE LEARNING PARTNERSHIP was born after a group of Toronto business executives began meeting to discuss their common interest in aiding the city's public schools. At the time, recalls Charlie Pielsticker, an insurance agency owner who played a leading role in The Learning Partnership's birth, he and his wife, Susan, were involved in a reading program for students at what is now Nelson Mandela Park Public School in Toronto. "In talking to other business people," says Pielsticker, "I realized a lot of individuals and companies were also doing voluntary work in education-related areas. But there was no coordination – no one knew what the others were doing." Pielsticker and a number of other business leaders agreed that their efforts would be more effective if they were coordinated. In June 1992, a meeting brought together the directors of 10 Toronto school boards and about 15 executives. "The basic question," says Pielsticker, "was whether there were areas where the private sector could make a coordinated contribution to public education. There was some fairly vigorous discussion, and, in the end, broad agreement that, yes, business could help."

The next step was research. Pielsticker and several other business people flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with officials of the National Association of Partners in Education, a body that coordinates corporate and volunteer partnerships with schools in the United States. Later, they visited Louisville, Kentucky, where local business people had forged successful collaborations with the public school system. "What we found," says Pielsticker, "were active partnerships between business and public education that were coming up with exciting and innovative ideas for schools."

Back in Toronto, the planning group decided to launch the project, but on a decidedly modest basis. Initial financing was limited to $5,000 from each of the approximately 20 firms then involved, and nearly the same amount from the 17 participating school boards (the scope had now expanded beyond the city proper to embrace the greater Toronto area). In the fall of 1993, the Learning Partnership began operating, with Gordon Cressy, a former vice-president of the University of Toronto, as president and chief executive officer. "They said they had ideas, but no programs," said Cressy. "'That's your job,' they told me."

One of the first Learning Partnership programs was Entrepreneurial Adventure, in which children from kindergarten to grade 9 are given the opportunity to develop a business operation. In this popular program, teachers and "business partners" from participating companies help children as they exercise literacy, mathematics and organizational skills while gaining a sense of what the business world is like.

Often, students use Entrepreneurial Adventure to raise money for a worthy cause. At River Oaks Public School in Oakville, Ont., just west of Toronto, science teacher Sean Marks and management consultant Sheryl Lubbock last year helped grade 8 children to organize a project that involved building more than two dozen wooden garden chairs. The children found buyers for the chairs and cleared a profit of about $650, which they donated to the school to help maintain the woodworking shop where the chairs were made. "It was interesting and gratifying to see how the kids evolved," says Lubbock. "They learned to start thinking in real business terms about what they were doing. And their excitement was a real gift to me."

Brian Kellet's grade 5 class at Westacres Public School in Mississauga, Ont., used Entrepreneurial Adventure to raise money for Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children.

In another Entrepreneurial Adventure, children in teacher Brian Kellett's grade 5 class at Westacres Public School in Mississauga, Ont., decided they would raise money for Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children by staging a student-teacher basketball game. Even with the help of Kellett and Nicole Wells, a Bank of Montreal marketing manager, the children had to face some of the tough realities of the business world. "They wrote letters and made telephone calls to local businesses soliciting support," says Kellett. "That wasn't easy for them, because people don't often take business proposals from 10- and 11-year-olds very seriously."

The children forged ahead, negotiating a $300 startup loan from the school council, arranging for the use of gymnasium space at a nearby high school and an appearance by the Toronto Raptors basketball club's Dance Pak. The teachers, with a decided height advantage, won the game. But the children were winners as well: after expenses and paying back the school council, they were able to give more than $1,000 to the hospital.

"It was very much like a real entrepreneurial project," says Wells. "The children came up with a money-making idea, got financial backing for it, created a marketing plan and sold their product."

Another of the Learning Partnership's programs embodies elements of science, mathematics and technology with a dash of entrepreneurship thrown in. Known as I³ (Investigate! Invent! Innovate!), the program for children in grades 7 and 8 is backed by Imperial, which is contributing $100,000 annually over a three-year period to help run it. Imperial's Jim Levins helped Learning Partnership officials develop I³, along with Fred Reichl, one of several Imperial retirees who work as volunteers with the organization. The program is designed to give children a competitive edge in the world of the 21st century. "What we're trying to do in I³," says Ron Ballentine, a science and technology coordinator for the Halton District School Board west of Toronto, "is to encourage and promote creative thinking, because creative thinking is a highly valued life and employment skill."

Students participating in I³ are asked to come up with an invention and make a working model of it. The invention has to be something people might actually buy and use, so the children have to think about advertising and marketing their product. First of all, says Fay Trimble, a teacher at Oakville's Abbey Lane School, students in I³ are taught about the creative thinking that can spawn innovation. After that, she says, "the big thing is for them to come up with their own invention – something that is needed in the world."

Though I³ is currently in its first year, similar principles were at work in a forerunner program called the Invention Convention, aimed at children in grades 4, 5 and 6. Elisabeth Ciavarella, a science and mathematics teacher at Cardinal Léger Catholic School on the outskirts of Toronto, is participating in I³ this year and was involved in the Invention Convention several years ago. She marvels at the concepts students came up with. "One girl had an idea for an improved toothbrush," she recalls. "And another student invented a device like a car wash for washing dogs." The program, she says, "is exciting for all students, not just the stronger ones."

The climax came that spring when children from Toronto-area schools displayed their ideas in the concourse of a downtown office building. "It was the icing on the cake," says Ciavarella. "The children were just so proud of themselves." And helping children to feel better about themselves, while enriching educational opportunities in the public schools, is what the Learning Partnership is all about. Notes Charlie Pielsticker: "All we're trying to do is help youngsters – if we can do that, we're all winners."

Photography: Susan King