Archive for March, 2007
ONE member and Chris Daughtry wears his EDUN ONE T-shirt on stage and during this interview with Fox News. Watch the full clip below.
As Fox broadcasted this interview yesterday, field organizers continued to organize ONE volunteers to table at over 25 Daughtry concerts across country this spring.
Local Atlanta ONE and RESULTS chapters organized and participated in the 500 person Tuberculosis Awareness Walk this Saturday.
The purpose of the walk was to bring attention to the problems and solutions associated with TB, a disease that kills 1.6 million people in the world each year and is the biggest killer of people with AIDS. Although we’ve been able to effectively treat TB for more than half a century, neglect of the disease over the years has allowed the emergence of drug-resistant strains of TB that are difficult, and in some cases nearly impossible, to treat. Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) could soon spread out of control, especially in Africa where so many people have AIDS.
Several speakers, including CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding, addressed the crowd about the danger of TB and the need to stop it. But it was ONE and RESULTS volunteer Patti Arias who told the crowd that average citizens could have an impact in stopping TB. While she was addressing the crowd, Patti phoned her member of Congress – Rep. Hank Johnson – and with the crowd’s help, she left a message for Rep. Johnson to, “Please co-sponsor the stop TB now Act!”
The Stop TB Now Act of 2007 was introduced in Congress last week to provide America’s share of support for the Global Plan to Stop TB. Over the next 10 years, if the plan is fully implemented, it will save 14 million lives. Other ONE members who want to make a difference can call their member of Congress and ask them to co-sponsor the Stop TB Now Act ( H.R. 1567). If you don’t know who your member of Congress is, you can look it up at www.house.gov.
The World Health Organization has published its yearly report on tuberculosis and one of its key overall findings is promising:
“The global tuberculosis (TB) epidemic has levelled off for the first time since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared TB a public health emergency in 1993.”
But, TB remains a major and devastating cause of death worldwide. More findings are below.
“There were an estimated 8.8 million new TB cases in 2005, 7.4 million in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. A total of 1.6 million people died of TB, including 195,000 patients infected with HIV.
TB prevalence and death rates have probably been falling globally for several years. In 2005, the TB incidence rate was stable or in decline in all six WHO regions, and had reached a peak worldwide. However, the total number of new TB cases was still rising slowly, because the case-load continued to grow in the African, Eastern Mediterranean and South-East Asia regions.”
You can view and even download the whole report here.
We just finished cleaning up and the last volunteer, Matt, is taking home the extra soda. It was a great day and I think that people here in Houston and all over Texas have learned some valuable skills and made some good connections.
Keep your eyes on the blog for the next ONE training: Minneapolis!
There are folks that drove here from all over Texas (and beyond!) so we broke up into groups so that people could meet other folks from their area and brainstorm ideas about how to take action in their area.
What I am hearing:
– Setting up tables at summer festivals
– Taking action on holidays to get people involved as part of their normal holiday activities. ONE trick-or-treaters, ONE bbqs on labor day, etc.
– Twists on regular fundraisers. Example: free car wash for taking action with ONE and signing up for the e-mail list.
– Go to farmers markets and harvest festivals. Engage people where people are. Talk to farmers about farming in the developing world and how they can help people just like them all around the world.
– Talk to local bands about being at their events
– Do community events like AIDS walks and other volunteer events as ONE
– Make your own event by taking pictures or making a movie. Do something fun that people want to do.
Kyle Pledger drove in from San Antonio today. He hasn’t been involved with a local group in San Antonio yet and came here to get plugged into activities in San Antonio. There are couple of other folks here from San Antonio and he’ll be going back with new connections and hopefully together they can fire up their town.
Krishna and Paresh Patel are brother and sister and live in Katy, Texas. They grew up all over the world, including Northern Africa and Italy. This helped get them into a truly global mindset.
Krishna is a senior in high school and has been involved with ONE for 2 years. She has volunteered with ONE on the Warped Tour and did the Houston AIDS Walk with the ONE team. She is looking to create a group, CincONE, at her high school and is here to learn more about how to make it happen.
Paresh has been interested in the ONE Campaign for a while, and his sister helped motivate him to come to training and get more involved. He studied economics and South Asia studies and now does international consulting for trade and foreign relations. He is excited about the way that (RED) and ONE can help people incorporate fighting poverty into their everyday lives.
Micah and Tamara are a young married couple from Nacogdoches (what a mouthful!), Texas.
Micah teaches special education at Luftkin High School and Nacogdoches High School. He has been doing service learning helping orphans learning to advocate for others who can’t for themselves. Some of the students didn’t have email addresses, and some can’t read or write. But they set the students up with e-mail, read ONE material to those who can’t read, and have those who can’t write draw pictures in place of letters to send to elected leaders.
Tamara is a social work student at Stephen F Austin State University. She is really interested in international field work with orphaned adolescents. She wants to help these kids find adoptive parents here in the U.S. and then help them get into universities with the help of their foster families. She is also interested in international policy, specifically advocating for trafficked peoples.
We just broke up into three groups to get into more detail about grassroots advocacy.
Right now in room 102 we are talking about in district lobbying meetings.
The first step is knowing your member of Congress. If you don’t know your representative, make sure to find out who it is on the House website. You might need your entire 9 digit zip code to find out which district you live in.
Now we are talking about the next step: getting in touch with your member’s office and talking about the issues. Whether or not your member’s political views are in line with your own, you can be an effective poverty advocate as saving lives and ending poverty is in no way a partisan issue.
The third thing is how to talk about the issues. Since poverty is such a big issue, there are lots of ways to talk about it with your member of Congress or one of their staffers. You can approach this as a faith issue, national security, or simply a moral imperative.
You don’t have to do these meetings alone. Talk to your friends about poverty and they will start to see you as a resource on this issue. Diane O’Brien told a story about when she was in college she would approach her professors and ask them if she could speak to her class, sometimes as many as 400 people. The more people you talk to about taking action with ONE, the more people will take action with you. Soon you’ll have plenty of people asking to go on lobbying trips with you.
No matter what, remember to be persistent and keep talking about the issues. It will pay off.
