They’ll Huff and They’ll Puff

Oct 15th, 2007 12:04 PM UTC
By Virginia Simmons

Super ONE volunteer Matthew McAllister is featured in the Huffington Post today. An except is below. Read the full piece here.

“Growing up, my view of what charity and humanitarian work looked like was a very vivid TV commercial in which there were shots of starving children in the slums with a large 1-800 number flashing at the bottom of the screen telling me I can save lives with either Visa or MasterCard. It wasn’t until a U2 concert in high school that my eyes were pried back open to the crisis of extreme poverty and global AIDS by an Irish rock star named Bono.

…The true inspiration to get involved didn’t kick in right there though, only weeks later, after receiving emails detailing some statistics of global poverty, did I decide to act….

My volunteer work for the ONE Campaign began in January of 2006 in the form of getting local cities to pass proclamations declaring their support for ONE and its goals. Specifically, urging our government to keep the promises President Bush made at the G8 conference in 2005, at which he pledged an additional 1% of the U.S. budget to go toward humanitarian efforts. This promise was a response to the Millennium Development Goals set at the G8 in 2000. The cities of Louisville, Boulder, Broomfield, Ft. Collins, and Denver are all now officially Cities of ONE, allying themselves with the anti-poverty movement. The State of Colorado’s senate also declared Colorado to be a State of ONE in the summer of 2006…”

TAGS: Uncategorized