Gabriel Bran Lopez, BA 08, who began helping others at a young age, had his sights on becoming Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister.
During his days as a Concordia student, Gabriel Bran Lopez co-organized Youth Fusion Jeunesse, a one-day conference on creative youth empowerment in Montreal; travelled to Uganda to work with orphans for the Concordia Volunteer Abroad Program; and received a 2007 Forces Avenir Personality Award and the Concordia University Alumni Association’s 2007 Outstanding Student Award. He is pictured at a Youth Fusion event May 21 at École Pierre-Dupuy in Montreal.
“There’s never enough time to do everything,” says Gabriel Bran Lopez, BA 08.
“There’s never enough time to apply for enough grants. There’s never enough time to call enough people, to have enough meetings.”
Despite all these time crunches, among other projects, Lopez has taught theatre and the arts to children in Uganda; secured government funding to encourage Quebec university campuses to go green; founded a nongovernmental organization; and was touted by a CBC television show as a potentially great prime minister. And he’s only 25.
Born in Guatemala during its nearly four-decade-long civil war, Lopez came to Canada with his family in 1986, when he was three. “My parents gave up everything for me. That taught me the desire to give something to others,” Lopez says.
As a sixth-grade student at St. Brendan School in Montreal, Lopez wrote a play about a boy with leukemia and the principal asked him to portray the lead. The production raised money for Leucan, an organization that supports children with cancer. The play introduced Lopez to theatre—which he’d go on to study at John Abbott College in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Que.—and confirmed that he could combine artistry and activism.
Similarly, Communication Studies at Concordia paired Lopez’s penchant for the arts with his involvement in community outreach efforts. “A comms degree can mean so much. You can do whatever you want with it,” he says. For Lopez, that means a career in political activism and politics.
He was behind the Generations Pact, a 2008 initiative through which the Quebec government invested $250,000 toward sustainable development on the province’s university campuses. He also spent last summer in Dakar, Senegal, working on an array of projects aimed at promoting human rights.
When Lopez returned to Canada, he refocused his efforts. “When I got off the plane from Senegal, the first thing I heard was that the graduation rate among high school students in Quebec is going down. Kids are dropping out,” he says. So Lopez began an organization called Youth Fusion that aims to increase teens’ stakes in their educations. Youth Fusion, which received funding from Concordia University and the Social Development Society of Ville-Marie, has begun working in two Montreal-area high schools, James Lyng, in the English sector, and Pierre-Dupuy, in the French sector.
“I gave presentations in front of every single kid at James Lyng,” says Lopez. He asked them: “What would motivate you to stay in school?” The students responded that they wanted their own newspaper and an environmental team. With the help of interns chosen from relevant programs at Concordia, Lopez made this happen. “The principal at James Lyng says that the atmosphere at the school—relations among students, and between students and teachers—has changed a lot since Youth Fusion came in,” he reports.
Lopez recently received a scholarship from the Jeanne Sauvé Foundation to continue running Youth Fusion. But he aspires to move further into politics, likely starting at the municipal level. He certainly has potential: Lopez made it to the final four of the CBC television show, Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister, which concluded March 18.
It’s an unconventional career path, Lopez admits. “But I don’t go down the usual route.”
—Lucas Wisenthal, BA 08
