Children’s author Rona Arato, left, wants her most recent book to teach Canadian children about homegrown heroes they can look up to.

Courage and Compassion: Ten Canadians Who Made a Difference profiles ten Canadians whose commitment to human rights led them to work on ways of improving the country and the world.

“I wanted [to profile] people who had worked at a grassroots level… who saw a situation that needed to be handled and they got out and did the job,” said Arato, a writer, editor and educator.

The 10 men, women and children featured in the book – Jeanne Mance, Josiah Henson, Nellie McClung, Lester B. Pearson, Roger Obata, June Callwood, Judy Feld Carr, Elijah Harper, Craig Kielburger and Hannah Taylor – represent a diversity of ages, ethnicities, backgrounds.

“I wanted to go through every period of Canadian history… I wanted to represent different groups that have lived in Canada. Asian, Jewish, black communities, as well as the Native community. I wanted different age groups, I wanted to show that there were children who have also been very influential,” said Arato, who became interested in writing children’s books about 10 years ago.

Arato, an American-native who taught in elementary schools before moving to Toronto in 1970, said she started her writing career with The CJN.

She went on to write for other publications and eventually dabbled in corporate writing.

When Arato was presented with the opportunity to be an interviewer for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah project in 1994, she realized that promoting human rights was something she wanted to do with her life.

“I did interviews for about four years. I did about 120 interviews with Holocaust survivors. That was one of the things that fuelled my desire to write about human rights. After doing that, I wasn’t happy doing just corporate work anymore. I really wanted to do something that had more meaning.”

In 2001, Arato worked on a project for B’nai Brith Canada called Taking Action Against Hate in 2001. This, she said, further pushed her to pursue a career as a children’s author that promoted human rights.

Since then, Arato has authored seven books including Ice Cream Town, a junior fiction novel about a Jewish immigrant in New York City, and is currently working on Mrs. Kaputnik’s Pool Hall and Matzo Ball Emporium, a story about a Russian Jewish family that comes to New York in 1890 with their pet dragon.

Although those titles do promote tolerance and diversity, Courage and Compassion takes a more direct approach to humanitarianism by focusing on people Canadian children can be proud of.

“I felt that Canadian children don’t have heroes, don’t have homegrown heroes to look up to. When they learn history, they don’t learn about Canadians who have been influential or Canadians who have been active in human rights in the ways that we did when I was growing up in the States,” Arato said.

The profiles in Courage and Compassion are in chronological order. Arato begins the book with Mance, a co-founder of Montreal who lived in the 17th century.

“She was a nurse and… she started the first hospital [in Montreal]. She believed that everyone deserved the right to health care, and she was active in ensuring that anyone who lived there would have the same rights,” Arato said.

Henson, a black slave, fascinated her so much that she was inspired to write a separate book about him titled Working for Freedom: The Story of Josiah Henson.

“He not only came up through the Underground Railroad [to Canada] with his wife and children, but once he came here and began to do well, he wanted to help other blacks who were escaping,” she said.

He established a group called the Dawn Community in Dresden, Ont., where he built a vocational school so that former slaves and their children could acquire skills and own land.

Arato also wanted to turn attention to a Canadian Jewish woman, Feld Carr, who rescued more than 3,000 Syrian Jews.

“She ran a clandestine network for 28 years that no one knew about, buying and smuggling and bringing Syrian Jews out and bringing them to Israel, the United States and Canada.”

Arato added that she made a point of including younger humanitarians –  Kielburger, the Thornhill native who started the humanitarian organization, Save the Children, when he was 12 years old and Hannah Taylor who started collecting money for the homeless when she was just five years old – to show children that they’re not powerless to make positive changes.

“I hope they’ll take away the message that if they see a situation that needs to be handled that they can make a difference,” Arato said. “They can stand up for a classmate that is being bullied, they can help a new child who is an immigrant who doesn’t speak the language, they can help a friend who is struggling with a subject.”