Anne: “This afternoon is all about taking the information you have and making it useful- so that next time we won’t be able to fit into this room. We’ll have to find a bigger one.”

Mike from Bread then came up to talk about outreach. We need to bring more people in, he says, because we are building a movement and numbers matter. It matters if a senator gets 3, 10, 100, or 2,000 letters. A senator is probably not going to read your letter. And one letter, no matter how well-written, is probably not going to change a senator’s mind. But if a senator’s office gets a large number of letters on the same issue, they’re going to pay attention to that issue.

Congressional offices don’t get many letters on poverty-development assistance, especially before the ONE Campaign came around.

Two basic steps to engaging people:

1) Ask them to sign up at ONE.org
2) Encourage them to take direct action

Mike tells us that one of his favorite things about ONE is that it empowers all of us to take this into our own hands. You can take these ideas to your own community. Below are some of Mike’s outreach ideas:

-When tabling, you have 30 seconds, ask people to “sign their name to the ONE Declaration and add their name to the fight against poverty.” Next, give them materials and bring a cell phone or a laptop with an internet connection. Get them to make a phone call or send an email to their member of Congress, right then and there while still at the table.
-You can use clip boards instead of tables. Stand outside of campus dorms. Go door to door in your neighborhood.
-Send email announcements to your friends and family.
-Place flyers on classroom seats, on bathroom stalls.
-Make public service announcements for a local radio station, place announcements in local newspapers about events and meetings.
-Use FaceBook. 80% of college students check their FaceBook accounts almost everyday and it had an incredible ability to spread messages.
-Present at other organizations’ events to talk about ONE.
-Hand out ONE Declaration sign-up sheets at your meetings and tell everyone to come to the next meeting with their sheets full of new names (and email addresses.)
-Start off and end meetings by having everyone write a letter to their member of Congress (it only takes two minutes.)
-Set up in-district meetings with your member of Congress or their office staff.
-Attend your members of Congress’ local Town Hall meetings, ask their stances on fighting global poverty.
-Identify “grass tops activist” who have direct relationships with members of Congress and get them involved in our fight.

Initiate your own movement in your hometown. Talk to classes, tell all your friends, table. If after a few days, you get 200 people to sign the ONE Declaration, and thirty of them are passionate enough to go on and get more people to sign on then you are moving our fight closer to its tipping point.

“The way that the world is today is not the way that it has to be. “