We've all seen those parents in the checkout lines, bribing toddlers with disposable toys for a moment of silent reprieve. Admittedly, we've both made friends with a florist to make up for missed birthdays and forgotten anniversaries. Each of us harbours a bit of consumer guilt. You buy things, you give things. For an instant, all is forgiven. But there is meaning beyond the material. Here's how you can shop without the high.

We've known Munro Chambers since his TV character, Eli Goldsworthy, pulled into the parking lot of the fictional Degrassi High in his vintage Hearse. Whether he's starring in a satirical fundraising video to benefit Haiti, or building a school in Ghana, 22-year-old Chambers is making a difference. We caught up with Chambers at a build site in Ghana, where he and his fellow Degrassi: The Next Generation cast members were volunteering to build a school.

Many development projects are the product of the Field of Dreams Syndrome: the naïve belief that if you build a hospital, school or well, somehow, magically, doctors and teachers and maintenance workers will just appear to make the project a success. If we don't empower communities to manage projects independently, we might as well throw our money down the well we just drilled. It's more cruel to promise a better life and not deliver than to never offer aid at all.

Brent Kreuger was written off as "lazy" and "stupid" in elementary school in the 1960s -- a time before the "distracted student" was a mainstream social problem. So Krueger set out create a learning environment where outside-the-box thinkers were labelled "entrepreneurial" instead of "learning disabled." He founded the Praxis International Institute, the alternative high school he now runs as principal.

Robin Wiszowaty left the gleaming strip malls, street grids and coiffed lawns of suburban Illinois for the wilds of rural Kenya in 2002. And she's never looked back. What was meant to be a brief exchange from the University of Illinois to the small Nkoyet-naiborr community in Kenya's Maasai Mara has morphed into her life's adventure. Here, Robin Wiszowaty tells us how she fell in sync with the heartbeat of Africa, and how she found her home.