Making a Difference While You Still Can

Whenever people ask me who I work for I more often than not instantly get a smile from perpetual strangers and some of the most touching personal stories about the role LEGO played in their childhood or still does for their own children. It is a wonderful privilege to be here and equally I feel it is an enormous responsibility I and my colleagues carry to ensure LEGO remains something kids (young and old) all over the world love.

Sometimes though, people get a bit sick of all our passion and think some of our emotional outpourings about how important creativity is for children a little schmaltzy - maybe because side by side with us on the toy shelf are countless other products aiming at children, some not even safe to play with and some so calculating in their approach that the only conclusion you could arrive at is that all toy companies must be evil exploiting little hands and minds with pointless diversions. Ironically - to some extent I would agree, there are plenty of products out there that fall in that category. To the same people, LEGO is also just another company, with politics and silly stuff and nothing of the 'specialness' that our fans talk about. To this though I have to vigorously disagree and explain why I'm here.

Before joining LEGO I worked for a UN-sponsored children's charity and one of our big focus areas was Agenda 21 and empowering young people to be part of the sustainable development of their communities. This work brought me in touch with young volunteers from all over the world and I got to travel to such disparate locations as Latin America, Africa and China on projects that were all about getting young people to take leadership of their own futures.

Despite how incredibly important the issue, it is heartbreaking how many young people out there are the victims of hunger, famine, war, AIDS or just the sheer lack of education, of opportunity and how very hard work it can sometimes be to inject hope into the eyes and minds of this generation on whose shoulders the future of the world rests. There is nothing more depressing than meeting 10 year-olds who have lost the will to live, because everything around them has been destroyed and they are consumed by hatred of the soldiers and people who killed their loved ones.

More depressing is the fact that they have never had the luxury of play, of discovery, of gradually gaining confidence in exploring their ideas and growing up to be curious and adamant learners, convinced in their own ability to make the best of a hopeless situation. But that is the gift of a creatively stimulating toy.

And thus for me, every year I go to the Toy Fair and am depressed in my heart and soul over how many rubbish toys are produced, pointless gadgets, little gimmicks that elicit a smile and 5 minutes of diversion before they too end up as landfill I know now for a fact that I could never work for another toy company than LEGO. Why? Because LEGO is more than a toy -

It is a mighty tool with the potential to reshape your mind and your thinking, but disquised as an innocent child's play thing it is not locked up in science labs as the exclusive tool of neuroscientists, but instead its out there, in children's toy chests around the world, giving the best gift a parent could ever give their child: the gift of creativity, of hope in a better future and the belief in your own ability to prevail over difficulty.

That is why I'm here.