In this world there are thousands and thousands of people working to make a difference, working to help other people regardless of creed, religion, or political affiliation. And it is of those people that Goodness TV wants to talk about.

Halo, kind viewers, and welcome to today’s Good People, Good Works featuring the first in a two-part series on Internet television station GoodnessTV which airs inspirational programs on noble individuals and groups who are uplifting our world through their sincere efforts to better humanity. The station’s founder is Laurent Imbault, a noted Canadian actor and comedian.

Mr. Imbault starred in the Canadian television drama “Watatatow,” a long-running series that addressed important social issues faced by youth. He has also appeared in films produced both in Canada and the USA. What inspired Mr. Imbault to create GoodnessTV? Surprisingly, he realized the need for such a station after speaking with his elderly mother.

My mother, she’s now 95 and three years ago she broke her hip and I spent a lot of time at the hospital with her. We talked a lot. At some point she said, “You know, I’m happy I am going to die soon, and I am not going to see all of this anymore.” And I asked, "What are you talking about, Mama? What is all of ‘this’?"

And she said “You know, all of this violence and all the bad news in the world.” She said, “I am tired of seeing this; I don’t see that there is hope.” And I thought, "Wait a second, Mama.” I said, "There’s hope."

And then I realized that we live in a world where we’re lacking positive input. There is no place where I can just relax and see good news, and think that maybe we’re going to make it as a human race!

So I came back and I told my wife, “Why don’t we do something? Why don’t we start a television station of good news, only good news?” And it turned out that it was easier to do it on the Internet. So I met some young programmers and I talked to them about the project, and everybody was really enthusiastic, so we started Goodness TV. What is the mission of Mr. Imbault’s television station?

Basically, the mission is to talk about people that are working to make this world a better place. It’s really dedicated to good news. The people I meet, the people I meet in my everyday life are good people. And basically there are millions of good people working to help others and working towards the good of others.

So GoodnessTV is basically about those people, whether they are individuals, whether they are working within the frameworks of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or the United Nations or Oxfam, or whether they are working within societies.

A lot of corporations are totally involved in their environment and help people in all kinds of projects, and we never hear about these corporations. We never hear about these people because there’s nowhere that you can hear about them.

With the help of several professionals who generously volunteered their time and expertise, Mr. Imbault developed GoodnessTV and quickly got the station up and running. The official launch was last September, so September 2009. And we launched the official French website. The English website was launched the first week or second week of January 2010.

We’re about 10 people now around the table, and I am totally amazed because nobody gets paid. Everybody’s working volunteer and pro-bono. And everybody shares ideas, everybody is really enthusiastic, and hopefully, as it grows, it’s just going to grow by itself.

All are welcome to introduce their work to the world on GoodnessTV. How does one get their show broadcast by the station? There’s three points of entry for GoodnessTV. Individuals, you and me and anybody that’s watching, can come and create a profile exactly like on YouTube, and upload videos that they feel are important or significant to them.

One very important thing is that all the videos on GoodnessTV have to be watched and approved by my people. We will not broadcast everything; it has to be within the framework of the mission of Goodness TV. So individuals can come in and create profiles and upload videos they feel are important to them, and they want other people to see and share those videos.

NGO’s, foundations, non-profit organizations can come and create profiles. And those two points of entry are free for everybody, so it’s free for individuals and it’s free for NGOs and non-profit organizations. Corporations, on the other hand, can do exactly the same thing, but at the same time they have to have a profile. So for instance, a car company could not just advertise on Goodness TV. The car company has to have a profile, and the profile has to be within the mission of Goodness TV.

After this brief message we’ll return to our fascinating interview with Laurent Imbault, founder of GoodnessTV. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Good People, Good Works, as we continue our program featuring Laurent Imbault, a noted Canadian actor and comedian who has started a unique Internet television station, GoodnessTV, which focuses on the goodness in life.

I am basically a media person. I’ve always been in front of cameras. I’m not afraid to be today in front of a camera, and I’m quite at ease with cameras. We’ve produced theater; we’ve produced small videos on all kinds of things. So it’s a whole experience for me to be able to finally put together all these experiences. So GoodnessTV for me is the sum total of all my experiences as an actor, as a producer, as a human being.

The GoodnessTV website is in French and English, but plans are in the works to make the site more accessible to a global audience by adding other languages as well.

The programmers have so far created a template. So now we can add a language very easily. I would love to have at least Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic, which are the six official United Nations languages, but we can have video. Somebody wrote to me the other day and said, "Could we have videos in Quechua?" which is the language of the Indians in Northern Peru.

And I said, "Well, why not? If somebody watches those videos in Quechua, I can certainly broadcast videos in Quechua." We’ve added recently the Hindi category, so we have videos in Hindi. We have videos in seventeen languages but the website is only officially in two languages. But we’ll add languages as they come along.

Mr. Imbault’s next GoodnessTV project involves producing his own original shows about benevolent individuals and organizations that are contributing towards the progress of humanity and the world.

So what we’d really like to do is also produce. So we want to have a daily broadcast. We want to produce videos with NGOs (non-governmental organizations). A lot of NGOs treat the Internet as a reading media and not as a cinema. To me it’s a cinema media, it’s a new media.

A lot of NGOs don’t have the capacity, the knowhow or the personnel to produce for this new medium. It’s a brand new medium, with an attention span of four, five minutes maximum. I find that NGOs are not quite there yet. They don’t know how to use this medium yet. So, hopefully, what I’d like to do is produce also a lot of videos for NGOs, in order for them to spread the word about what that they’re doing.

I am going to Africa in the summertime and we’re visiting four countries in Africa. And really what I want to do is go in the field and ask those people, “What is working?” If I see a smile of a child, if I see happiness, I know that you’re doing good work.

The response to GoodnessTV has been remarkable, with viewers from around our globe watching the posted videos.

We have all kinds of viewers, and again I am totally flabbergasted. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and look at my Google report, and I have people from a hundred countries. I would never have thought in my wildest dreams that I could reach out and talk and communicate with people from a hundred countries that I don’t know.

Sometimes I get people from Yemen, I get people from Saudi Arabia, I mean they’re foreign countries to me. And I go “Wow,” I got somebody from Japan, and people from Southeast Asia. They come because they find something there that relates to them, that talks to them. And that’s how I know that my idea is a universal idea, and that the site exists beyond me.

Our world is increasingly getting closer through the advancement of communication technologies. Laurent Imbault feels strongly that this is a wonderful trend that can only mean great things for us all. I truly believe that we are the generation that can put an end to extreme poverty. The human race today is at a point where it’s never been before. We have never been connected like this in the whole of history.

We have never lived the way we’re living now, with the capacity of touching people hundreds, thousands of miles away, of communicating, picking up the phone. And my son is traveling now in India and Thailand and I can see him. He connects on the Internet. The technology today is unique in the whole of the human race, of the development of history.

How did the station help a teacher in India? How was it able to bring together the people of India and Bolivia? Find out by joining us again next Sunday on Good People, Good Works for part two of our engaging discussion with Laurent Imbault. Many thanks Laurent Imbault and dedicated, kind-hearted associates for starting GoodnessTV, which brings happiness to viewers and makes our world a more beautiful place to live.

For more details on GoodnessTV, please visit: www.GoodnessTV.org

Our appreciation enlightened viewers for your company on today’s program. Up next is The World Around Us, after Noteworthy News. May we all enjoy abundance, friendship and joy each day of our lives.

My name is Laurent Imbault. I am a 62-year-old Montreal (Canada) actor and I decided:
1) I had enough of the catastrophic view of the mainstream media.
2) It was unfair that only rich people could be philanthropists. So I'm a poor philanthropist.

Halo, loyal viewers, and welcome to today’s Good People, Good Works featuring the conclusion of a two-part series on Internet television station GoodnessTV which airs inspirational programs on noble individuals and groups who are uplifting our world through their sincere efforts to better the human condition. The station’s founder is Laurent Imbault, a noted Canadian actor and comedian.

Mr. Imbault starred in the Canadian television drama “Watatatow,” a long-running series that addressed important social issues faced by youth. He has also appeared in films produced both in Canada and the USA. As Mr. Imbault explains, one of GoodnessTV’s objectives is to connect people and organizations through its programs, and thus accelerate constructive change around the globe.

The idea is to hopefully create a network of people sharing ideas, sharing know-how, knowledge, experiences, so that things can move a lot faster than they’re moving now. Because it seems to me that every time people want to do something, they start from scratch. They go in villages and start from scratch, and they never share experiences about what works, what doesn’t work; what has been done in one country, could work in another one.

But the ideas are not shared because there is no platform. There is nowhere where people can share those ideas. So GoodnessTV really wants to become ‘goodness network’ where people can exchange all these ideas and grow faster.

I just recently came back from India where I spent three weeks. And I met a lot of NGOs in India. And there are a lot of good people, a lot of good work being done there. For instance, I met an organization called Pragya, and Pragya works in the upper Himalayas, 10,000 feet and higher. And my wife was recently in Bolivia, and she met a similar organization in Bolivia which is called Mano a Mano and they work in the upper Andes (mountains).

And when Pragya saw the video that my wife shot in Bolivia, immediately they went, “Wait a minute, we should talk to one another because we have the same network, framework of working. We’re working in the same conditions more or less, so maybe we have developed know-how that they can use. And maybe they have developed know-how that we can use.”

Mr. Imbault, who realizes that technological advances provide a fantastic way to bring people together and give them hope, shares his plans for broadening the scope of GoodnessTV.

And 10 years from now, things are going to be very different. And things are going to be very integrated, where people can talk and communicate. And we’re working now to develop web streaming, like instantaneous web streaming.

My wife was in Copenhagen for the (climate) summit in December, and with the iPhone she can suddenly capture Desmond Tutu doing a speech, and we can broadcast it. And it’s fantastic, and the more it’s going to go, the more people are going to be able to streamline and tell us what is happening in the world.

And ultimately what we wanted really to do is to have an actual television, where you come every morning and there’s an anchorperson saying "Hi, welcome to Goodness TV, this is Tuesday. Today we’re having people in South Africa, there’s this happening in South Africa, there’s this thing happening in Nairobi, there’s this thing happening in India," and to have young reporters in the field in these countries telling us every day what is being done today.

What is good, what is happening, what is the good news today in your part of the world, tell us. And we have a newscast every day with an anchorman saying, "Well we have good news coming from this place and that place and all over the world." Because we need hope; if the human mind doesn’t have hope he will not survive.

Why do we need stations such as GoodnessTV? Viewers may be inspired by watching stories about the kindness and nobility that exists in our world and wish to create the very same spirit where they live.

We live because we have dreams. If the human mind could not dream, we could not exist. We are all, you and I, and everybody that’s watching this, the product of someone’s dream, the product of millions of dreams.

I personally go back to the beginning of the human race, because somebody dreamt of having a child, and that person dreamt of a better life for his child or her child, and I am the result of all this dreaming. And we need to dream that we’re going to make it. We need to dream that the human mind and the human spirit will evolve into a higher consciousness, and that we’re going to live in a world of peace.

When we return, Mr. Imbault will discuss how GoodnessTV is helping a sincere, humble Indian schoolteacher. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Good People, Good Works, as we continue our intriguing interview with Canadian actor Laurent Imbault, founder of GoodnessTV. Mr. Imbault believes that media outlets such as his can truly benefit our world in large and small ways, and shares a recent experience in India.

I think people need to be happy. I created something while I was in India. I had an idea, because I met this wonderful guy who invited me and my son into his house. HHHHhhhe comes from a very small village. He was very, very poor. And through working very hard at night and trying to make money he got a master’s degree from a university.

And now he’s working for a big, I think, British corporation. Anyway, he’s making money and he’s well off. And he, on a regular basis, goes back to his village and teaches French and English to the children in his village for free. And I said, “Sunil, what can I do for you? Can I help? Can I give you money?”

He says, “I don’t need money.” He says, “But I will need pencils and I will need erasers. And I will need school books.” And I thought, “Wait a minute. There are probably, hundreds of thousands of people doing this that don’t need money that will need books and school supplies.

So I’m going to create something called “Micro Goodness.” And it’s going to be a special area in GoodnessTV where you can go and say, “Oh! This guy needs 12 pencils. I can go to the pharmacy; I can go to the store and easily buy 12 pencils, put them in an envelope, put his name on it and mail it. That I can do!”

It’s not a big thing. But for him, it’s major. There’s people in Africa, there’s people in Asia, there’s people all over the world trying to teach other kids that have absolutely nothing. They have no blackboard, they have no chalk, and they have nothing. I can certainly help those people.

And ordinary people can read this and say, “Hey! What is 12 pencils? What is CAD$10 of school supplies? I can go to the store and buy that, and put that in an envelope, put a name on it and mail it.” And we need to get a sense that you and I can change things.

There’s so much more we can do that will give us a feeling of accomplishment, a feeling of having done something. Today I did something for another human being. I helped somebody today. And that makes me feel good, makes them feel good, and it helps the kids.

Although GoodnessTV has only been on the air for less than a year, Laurent Imbault is encouraged by the response he receives from viewers.

I get a lot of feedback. I get people who write to me and thank me for doing this. People will post comments on the website. We created a blog about two weeks ago; while I was in India, I started to write a blog, and now we’re going to add a forum to this.

To Mr. Imbault, running GoodnessTV is an act of love, and is similar to creating a work of art.

I am a professional actor. I am an artist, and I approached this the way an artist would approach it. An artist wants to create something; he doesn’t want to create it to sell it. He wants to create it because he has an immense urge to create. This was done the same way; It’s not a question that I am creating this to make money, I am creating this because I am an artist and I think that it’s my need to create it.

Devoting his time, energy and personal finances to this worthwhile and praiseworthy project, Laurent Imbault views GoodnessTV as his gift to the world.

To me this is my legacy to the world. I am not very good at caretaking, I could never go out in the field, like people that go to Haiti and go to Africa and help. I am not very good at that. I know that. But this is what I can do.

My little contribution is Goodness TV, because I am good at that. I am good with producing, I am an actor, I can talk to a camera, I can do narrations, I am good with people, so that I can do. So this is my legacy, Goodness TV. This is what I am giving to the world.

May Providence bless you Mr. Imbault and dedicated associates for your kind-hearted efforts to improve and uplift our world. We wish GoodnessTV great success in the future, and may many more people benefit from its refreshing programs.

For more details on GoodnessTV, please visit: www.GoodnessTV.org

Thank you for watching today’s Good People, Good Works here on Supreme Master Television. The World Around Us is next, after Noteworthy News. May we all forever enjoy inner peace and tranquility.