September 30th, 2008 at 5:43 pm | posted by Betsy Avila
If you’re a Los Angeles ONE member or are going to be in the LA area on October 3rd, you won’t want to miss the regional premiere of “A Powerful Noise,” co-hosted by ONE, CARE and GOOD Magazine at the prestigious Artivist Film Festival.
This moving documentary by Tom Cappello follows four women — Nada Markovic, Bui My Hanh, and Jacqueline “Madame Urbain” Dembele — as each goes about the daily business of empowering, educating, and seeking justice in their respective societies. Weaving through locations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mali, Vietnam, “A Powerful Noise” tells a tale of hope much larger than the sum of its parts.
The Artivist Film Festival, running October 2-5 in LA, is the first international Film Festival dedicated to raising awareness for the Interdependence between Humanity, Animals and the Environment. The 2008 Artivist Program includes 40 films from 40 countries around the world, and ONE is excited to have “A Powerful Noise” amongst them.
You can get more information and purchase tickets for the October 3rd showing of “A Powerful Noise” here.
And you can get into the show for free by volunteering for ONE before the event. Volunteer here.
September 30th, 2008 at 1:40 pm | posted by Sen.Bill.Frist.M.D
In 2006, Save the Children, in partnership with Warm Up America Foundation launched a campaign called Caps to the Capital where almost 25,000 knitters and crocheters made caps for newborns in developing countries and wrote letters to the President to call for greater leadership and funding for newborn and child health.
Due to the overwhelming success of this campaign, Save the Children and Warm Up America are re-launching this effort in a campaign called Knit One, Save One. This campaign is a grassroots initiative asking knitters and crocheters to make a cap to help warm newborn babies around the world. In 2008, we are hoping to double our previous impact by engaging 50,000 knitters and crocheters to make 500,000 caps!
As part of the previous campaign, I traveled to Bangladesh with Save the Children to provide babies with knit caps and simple basic care such as vitamin A drops. From this experience, I was reminded that despite the technological advances of modern medicine, simple interventions can often save a young life.
Those babies that we assisted were fortunate. They escaped the unthinkable fate of the 2 million children each year who die the day they are born. In total, over 9 million children — one every three seconds — die annually from preventable causes. Ninety-nine percent of these deaths take place in the developing world. One in every six children in sub-Saharan Africa still fails to reach his or her fifth birthday. Many parents even resist naming a baby during the first six weeks of life because they fear the child will not survive a reality utterly unthinkable in the United States.
September 30th, 2008 at 10:35 am | posted by Steve.Wilson
Foreign policy advisors to Sens. Obama and McCain lay out both candidates’ policy objectives for Africa in two separate articles posted on allAfrica.com. The articles are excerpted from remarks made at a recent National Press Club Forum, “U.S.-Africa Policy Agenda and the Next Administration.”
Last week at the ONE Music Builds Tour stop in Phoenix, Arizona, local ONE volunteers came out in full force to talk about the ONE Campaign and our efforts to raise awareness about global health and extreme poverty.
The Tour, which featured outstanding performances from Third Day, Robert Randolph & The Family Band, Switchfoot and Jars of Clay, brought thousands of energized fans to the Dodge Theatre in downtown Phoenix.
Armed with clipboards, ONE pamphlets and our signature white ONE wristbands, ONE volunteers set out to inform and sign up the excited crowd. Collectively we were able to get more than 300 concert-goers to sign the ONE Declaration.
Stay tuned for more from the Music Builds Tour, which continues this week with a concert on October 2nd in Dallas, Texas!
September 29th, 2008 at 3:38 pm | posted by Chris.Scott
President Bill Clinton appeared on Meet the Press this Sunday and had a chance to speak out about the Clinton Global Initiative and Africa. When pressed by MTP host Tom Brokaw about why Americans facing an economic crisis should care about global poverty, Clinton remarked that providing aid to Africa addressed the two main concerns in the upcoming US presidential election– namely, “how to restore economic strength and broadly shared prosperity and how to restore America’s position in the world.”
Partial transcript below:
MR. BROKAW: When you ran successfully for president in 1992, the unofficial slogan was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” It’s hard to imagine, given the political and especially the financial climate that we’re all living in now that someone can say it’s about aid to Africa, stupid, or it’s about AIDS, stupid, or it’s about doing something about poverty, stupid. Is this not going to be an issue, your great work here as the Clinton Global Initiative, in this campaign? Is it going to have to be set off to the side?
PRES. CLINTON: Well, I think the answer is it will not–it’s not nearly as big an issue for the two thirds of American people who are having trouble paying their own bills and are worried about their future. On the other hand, I think there–the two great issues in America in this election are how to restore economic strength and broadly shared prosperity and how to restore America’s position in the world. I think–if I were making the CGI argument in a political speech, I’d say we’re not going to have the America we want unless prosperity is broadly shared, and to do that, we have to have economic opportunity in the poorest parts of America. And in the world, the places where America is popular today in the world, really popular, 10 countries in central and eastern Africa. Look at the Pew poll. Wildly popular. Why? Because they see us through the prism of President Bush’s AIDS and malaria programs and the work the Gates Foundation does, the work that I do, the work that others do. So we can–this should be presented to the American people that as a part of our participation in the interdependent world, we actually make more partners and fewer enemies.
MR. BROKAW: One of the concerns that the Gates Foundation has, that everything coming out of Africa that is reported is doom and gloom, and they say there are real success stories there.
PRES. CLINTON: Absolutely.
MR. BROKAW: And the American people need to hear about that.
PRES. CLINTON: The American–first of all, I wish we could have a cessation in the use of the word Africa for just 18 months while America learns that Africa is a continent that just in sub-Saharan Africa has 48 separate countries, and that it’s not just the geography, it’s the politics, the culture, the language, everything is different, and that yes, there’s been bad news in Darfur, yes, there’s been bad news out of Zimbabwe, but you have country after country after country with very high growth rates and remarkable progress. I mean, Rwanda, genocide in ‘94, 10 percent of the country dies in 90 days. Four years later, their per capita income still well under $300 a year, 10 years later, $1,000 a year. Nearly quadrupled their per capita income. That’s the real Africa. That is far more representative of what the African people are doing and can do tomorrow than the other, and I really wish every time we talked about it–you should discuss it with your news people–whether we would mention a country. You might say, “Oh, by the way, it’s in Africa,” but we’ve got to stop thinking of Africa as a monolith.
September 29th, 2008 at 12:11 pm | posted by Chris.Scott
Though over 108,000 of you signed our petition to get Just One Question about global poverty asked at Friday’s debate it never came up. That’s why we’re asking Tom Brokaw to come through at the next presidential debate.
Click the link below to add your name to our “Just ONE Question” petition, and let’s make it clear that this debate will not be complete without a question on the candidates’ plans to fight global poverty.
September 26th, 2008 at 11:45 am | posted by Virginia Simmons
ONE co-founder Bono spoke with CNN’s John Roberts on “American Morning” this morning about recent successes and future plans in our fight against global poverty. You can watch the whole interview below, and read the full transcript on CNN.com.
An excerpt:
“BONO: We got good news this week. I know normally I’m on your program with bad news — the whingeing rock star — but it’s great. There’s a disease, malaria — it’s 3,000 African kids die every day of mosquito bites. Sounds mad, but it’s true. And people have committed and it looks like the funds are on the table so that that disease will be no more by 2015. That makes people like me punch the air and everyone who wears a ONE T-shirt and all our white band campaigners on college campuses all over the country — it was a great day for them yesterday so we’re celebrating that. I know it’s extraordinary, that while you’re having this meltdown on the markets, that people could even concentrate on this stuff, but I’m really grateful that they did. We had both [presidential] candidates make very powerful statements about the necessity for nonmilitary tools, for instance, in foreign policy. This is an America that both candidates want to show to the rest of the world — the greatness of America.”
September 26th, 2008 at 11:34 am | posted by Field
Spirits remained high, even after waiting in lines for 2 hours, to represent ONE at a “Change We Need” Rally in Philadelphia with guests of honor, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden. When we met up with Jill Biden, we were able to hand-deliver a familiar gift. Dr. Biden laughed as she put on her ONE wristband thanking me because she had left her “ONE bands at home.” I think her laugh had something to do with the fact that it was the THIRD band I had given her in two weeks!
Dr. Biden has spent a lot of time in the Philadelphia area lately and ONE volunteers have been there thanking her for her support every step of the way! Perhaps she discussed her multiple campaign trail run-ins with ONE with Ms. Obama who will hopefully receive just as many ONE bands from PA volunteers before November 4!
September 26th, 2008 at 10:20 am | posted by Virginia Simmons
ONE’s new TV ad - set to air on cable nationally surrounding the upcoming president debates.
Our petition, asking debate moderator Jim Lehrer to ask “Just ONE Question” about extreme poverty now has 107.905 signatures. We’ll keep delivering new signatures as they come in, so sign on if you haven’t already.
September 25th, 2008 at 4:00 pm | posted by Emily.Bergantino_MalariaNoMore
Reporting to you live from outside the 2008 MDG Malaria Summit…
At the 2008 MDG Malaria Summit in New York today, global leaders in health, government and business announced over $3 billion in new malaria money to help spur the world toward ending malaria deaths by 2015 - making it the single biggest day for malaria announcements in the history of the fight against the disease.
Speakers including Bono, Gordon Brown, Bill Gates, President Kagame of Rwanda and President Kikwete of Tanzania discussed how far the world has come in recent years to combat malaria and how far we still have to go. Peter Chernin, President and COO of News Corporation and Malaria No More Chairman, helped moderate the event, adding that malaria is not an isolated disease but both a consequence and cause of extreme poverty.
Two of the biggest announcements were from the World Bank and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, announced $1.1 billion as funding for Phase II of the World Bank Booster Program and Rajat Gupta, Chair of the Global Fund, announced Round 8 funding recommendations for malaria control efforts totaling $1.62 billion.
In celebrating the new commitments, grassroots support and political will that is driving the worldwide effort to end malaria deaths, event host UN Special Envoy for Malaria Ray Chambers urged the community not to become complacent. While today represents a big step forward, the race to end deaths - 3,000 children every day - is far from over.
The ONE Blog is a daily log of the anti-poverty movement. The site is operated by ONE staff, volunteers, members and coalition partners.
The content of each post and each comment represent the views of that author and does not necessarily reflect the views of the ONE Campaign or ONE Action. ONE does not support or oppose any candidate for elected office, and any posts expressing support or opposition for a candidate is not endorsed by ONE.
