Spread the Net
organization
Spread the Net is a charitable organization that aims to reduce malaria in African nations. It was co-founded by Rick Mercer, a Canadian satirist, and Belinda Stronach, a former Canadian Member of Parliament and philanthropist. A partnership with UNICEF Canada has allowed Spread the Net to achieve the goal of distributing 500,000 insecticide-treated bed nets to Liberia and Rwanda. Spread the Net now works with its partners to combat malaria. The campaign has donated over 539,000 nets since its founding.
History
In 2006, Rick Mercer and Belinda Stronach travelled to Africa along with Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the UN Millennium Project, in preparation to co-host the Millennium Promise Convention in Montreal on November 9, 2006. At the convention, Mercer and Stronach, along with Jeffrey Sachs and Nigel Fisher, President and CEO of UNICEF Canada, announced their intention to begin the Spread the Net campaign and raise $5 million for insecticide treated bed nets to be given to children and pregnant women in Liberia and Rwanda. One X One founder Joey Adler and Millennium Promise Conference founder Daniel Germain each gave $150,000 to the campaign at the conference. The first order for 33,000 bed nets was made on March 28, 2007.
By December 2011, Spread the Net achieved its founding goal; 500,000 nets distributed to pregnant women and children in Liberia and Rwanda.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Spread the Net” is organization. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Spread and organization, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “organization” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7580268. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2007 and 2011.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Spread the Net” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.