In hockey, Herb Carnegie never really stood a chance.
A black man playing a white man’s game, the National Hockey League just wasn’t ready for him in the 1940s and he had to settle for life in Quebec’s senior circuit, where he was briefly a teammate of future hall-of-famer Jean Beliveau.
But Carnegie, who died last year at 92, didn’t let his struggles and rejection get him down. Instead he started the first hockey school in Canada, an organization that would inspire thousands to take up leadership roles on and off the ice.
Today his daughter Bernice heads the Herbert H. Carnegie Future Aces Foundation, and she made a stop at Thunder Bay’s McKellar Park School, where a group of exceptional students were taught the ins and outs of being a successful leader and character development.
It was her first trip to the Lakehead area with the foundation.
“We affect over 100,000 students every year with our initiative,” she said Thursday. “So we’ve been given a wonderful mandate this year by the ministry of education to share our message farther afield from the area where we’re from in Toronto.”
The idea behind the program is to help students find the best in themselves and learn to be the leaders they’re meant to be.
“It’s all about finding the heart in who you are, believing that you can be a better person, that you can make a contribution to your community, to your school and to your family,” Carnegie said.
“It starts there.”
Getting children to buy in can be difficult, with so much information bombarding them. It’s the job of the foundation, teachers and parents to help youngsters understand they can be part of the solution for the world.
The foundation’s plan revolves around 12 statements that begin with two simple words: I will.
“We don’t expect somebody else to do everything for us, but we know that even little kids can empower themselves. They know right from wrong. They can say yes or no. If somebody hits them they know maybe they can go for help instead of striking back,” Carnegie said.
“We try to teach them the little things that help them to understand that they can have a better lifestyle.”
Jimmy Tsang was one of the students in Thursday’s session, and the 11-year-old said he’d already taken in a lot.
“The best part of is that I get to learn stuff on how to make me a better person,” said Jimmy, who is already an ambassador at McKellar Park.
For more information on the foundation, visit www.futureaces.org.
