For more than 60 years, the Duke of Edinburgh's International Award – Canada has supported young people to build confidence, character and purpose. No ceremony marks the beginning of an Award pursuit. No single teacher delivers its invaluable lessons. Instead, a participant's quest for an Award unfolds through a pursuit of personal goals – a service commitment honoured, a physical challenge met, an adventurous journey challenged, and a skill achieved not for a grade but for satisfaction.
That quietly transformative quality makes the Award worth preserving, and why a growing number of Canadians are choosing to include the Award in their estate plans.
"For the Award, gifts made as part of an estate plan allow one generation to invest thoughtfully in the next, ensuring that young people, far into the future, continue to have access to experiences that build resilience, confidence and purpose," says Anastazia Krneta, director of Philanthropy at Duke of Edinburgh's International Award – Canada.
The Award's framework, which spans service, physical activity, skill-building and an adventurous journey, was never designed to replicate classroom education. Rather, it was designed to complement it. Participants set their own goals, progress at their own pace and define achievement in ways that are personally meaningful. That intentional flexibility has proven remarkably durable across generations of social and economic change.
Now, the Award is deepening its reach into Canada's formal education system. A co-curricular pilot initiative is integrating the Award's experiential learning framework into public high schools and trades training programs in provinces coast to coast. The model is designed to make the Award available to more youth of all backgrounds and abilities than ever before including youth from lower-income households, rural and remote communities, Indigenous backgrounds, and those pursuing skilled trades rather than university pathways.
The implications are significant. By embedding the Award within existing school structures, the cost and logistical barriers that have historically limited participation are substantially reduced. A student in a northern Saskatchewan high school or a young apprentice in a Halifax trades program can now pursue the same internationally recognized credential as a student attending an independent school in Toronto or Vancouver.
CEO Mark Little has framed this expansion as central to the organization's long-term mission: ensuring the Award remains not merely prestigious but genuinely accessible. That ambition, however, requires the kind of stable, patient funding that annual fundraising campaigns rarely provide.
This is where legacy giving becomes essential, says Ms. Krneta. Charitable bequests and estate gifts offer something that campaign dollars cannot: the predictability to plan across decades rather than fiscal years. For a youth-serving organization with a proven model and a growing mandate, that long-term stability is the difference between incremental programming and genuine national scale.
Ms. Krneta is direct about the governance dimension. "From a governance perspective, legacy giving is fundamentally a form of stewardship. It allows supporters to help safeguard a national institution that has quietly shaped generations of young Canadians, and to ensure that its impact continues well into the future."
The need has rarely felt more urgent. Canadian youth are navigating a landscape marked by mental health pressures, economic precarity and a workforce in structural transition. Surveys consistently show young people feeling under-equipped – not for lack of academic instruction, but for waning confidence, civic grounding and a sense of self-determination, qualities that can be developed through personal challenge and earned accomplishment.
The Award has been answering that need since 1963. What makes it extraordinary, Ms. Krneta notes, "is its durability. While the world has changed dramatically over the past 60 years, the need for young people to develop character, agency and a sense of service has only grown stronger."
Legacy giving, at its core, is a statement of faith in that continuity – a decision to extend one's values forward, past the boundaries of a single lifetime, into the lives of young Canadians not yet born.
For those who have earned the Award, supported it or simply believe in what it represents, Ms. Krneta says an estate gift offers "a meaningful opportunity to help positively shape the next generation."
To learn more, visit dukeofed.org. Advertising feature produced by Randall Anthony Communications. The Globe's editorial department was not involved.
