Before 30-year-old Victoria internal Cory Monteith was belting out ballads on a strike TV low-pitched comedy Glee, he was a uneasy girl struggling with drug obsession and a issues that too mostly come with a damaged home.

These days he’s a goodwill envoy for RE*Generation, a commencement to residence girl homelessness upheld by Virgin Unite, a free arm of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group of companies.

Metro sat down with a six-foot-three triple-threat in Vancouver on Friday to speak about how some-more than $50,000 in grants from Virgin Unite will assistance internal at-risk youth. The income is going to a Broadway Youth Resource Centre, and a entertainment module for girl called Project Limelight.

(Sorry, Glee fans, questions about a uncover and his budding intrigue with co-star Lea Michele were particularly off limits!)

M: How did we turn an envoy for RE*Generation?

CM: we started with RE*Generation on interest of Virgin Unite 3 years ago in Toronto, something like that, lifting recognition of Canada’s inhabitant girl homeless problem: how many homeless girl there are in a country. It’s such a developed, rich republic really, per capita. That shouldn’t be a problem.

M: Is that something we saw a lot of flourishing adult on Vancouver Island?

CM: Sure. It’s bizarre to grow adult in a place like Victoria. It’s beautiful. It’s a postcard, with all these tourists entrance from all over a universe to see this pleasing city, we know, tiny small British town, and we have kids sleeping a streets and things in sleeping bags, in doorways. It doesn’t seem congruent, it doesn’t work, doesn’t seem right, and we consider it’s systematic. It’s not a matter of resources or ability to repair a problem, it’s only a matter of anticipating a people that are indeed going to do something about it during a village level.”

M: What does Project Limelight meant to we personally?

CM: This is a same lady (Maureen Webb, co-founder of a Project Limelight Society), a same module underneath a opposite guise, that started me and arrange of lighted my passion for a arts. It’s a reason we started acting, so my heart is tighten to this module since it’s moving kids to do something different, get concerned their community. The networking that happens for these kids, they get to all know any other. It’s priceless, and it brings people together, and it keeps people out of trouble. It did for me.

M: How so?

CM: we started going to behaving classes once a week during Red Room Studio (in Nanaimo), that is what Project Limelight was called when we was 19, and it was those initial classes when we started reading these plays and started sanctimonious to be someone else. My initial behaving clergyman that we met by a program, Andrew Mcllroy, said, ‘You know, you’re kind of good during this. You should keep it up, see where it goes,’ and we had never been good during anything adult until that point. So that was arrange of a commencement for me, and it’s a commencement of something for all these kids, too.

Canadians can present $5 to Virgin Unite and RE*Generation by texting REGEN to 30333.