Last Friday we visited with St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman. We thanked him for his support in declaring St. Paul a City of ONE during a multi-declaration event for the Twin Cities and the State of Minnesota last month.
We’re very glad to have Mayor Coleman, his staff, and the city of St. Paul join us in our efforts to end extreme poverty!
-Rochelle Gibbs & Kris Jernigan, Twin Cities ONE Members
All this week, Bono and Jeffrey Sachs will be blogging for the Financial Times from the United Nation’s summit on the Millennium Development Goals.
As a precursor, the Financial Times conducted a Q & A with Bono. An excerpt is below, and the full piece is at FT.com.
AB: What is this week [and the Millennium Development Goals summit] all about?
Bono: Most of us woke up on New Year’s Day 2000 with a hangover and a hazy memory of a night of pleasant fanfare and dumb parade. However, the new millennium was also celebrated by our commitment to eight goals that would change the planet and demonstrate to the developing world how we might, through a combination of know-how and resources, partner with them in efforts to help millions out of desperate poverty. We gave ourselves 15 years, we’re halfway there. How do we measure up?
AB: What are the two or three goals you want to achieve this week?
Bono: 1. Blogging for the FT, being your roving reporter in the canyons of Manhattan. While the world upends on Wall Street, I’ll be mostly midtown at the UN and the Clinton Global Initiative talking about the resilience of the world’s poor while the world’s rich find out how fragile life can be.
2. Unlock €1bn of unspent European Union Common Agricultural Policy money. This year our farmers don’t qualify for it, food prices are high. African farmers desperately need it.
3. Show what’s working as well as what’s not. Bad news about Africa travels much farther than good news. There will be a historic and innovative announcement on malaria on Thursday – watch out for it. Thanks to debt relief, aid and African leadership, 29m more children are going to school.
On Thursday, Senator John McCain came to Iowa for the first time with new running mate Governor Sarah Palin.
The event was held at an air hanger in the Cedar Rapids airport and thousands of people attended, including many University of Iowa students in ONE T-shirts!
After the event, and after Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin toured parts of Cedar Rapids to see devastation from recent flooding, their motorcade pulled up to a long line of people, including ONE members, waiting for the senator and governor to board their plane.
As they walked through the line and shook hands, Senator McCain saw our ONE shirts and said that ONE is a wonderful organization and thanked us for what we do.
Next in the line came Governor Sarah Palin who shook hands with a ONE member who handed her a ONE band. She said “right on!” and immediately put on the band. (See our video). We were so happy to have represented ONE on Gov. Palin’s first visit to Iowa!
For the weekend of September 20th and 21st the ONE Bus took the Big Apple by storm! New York City was hosting a week of meetings surrounding the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and ONE decided to get a head start on the meetings and hit the streets to get the word out about the fight for the world’s poorest people.
On Saturday we were on Fifth Avenue and 58th street and on Sunday we were right on Broadway and 52nd Street- both proved to be great locations with lots of people to talk with about ONE and the MDG’s.
On September 19th the ONE bus rolled onto the historic College of William & Mary to get their students more involved in the fight against extreme poverty around the world! Lauren Conn our PA Field Organizer is an alumnus and hooked us up with the campus Rotaract club who sponsored our visit.
It was a beautiful day and the bus set up shop right in the middle of campus to recruit new members to ONE as students made their way to class. We had tons of volunteers come out to help us man the bus while we blasted music, gave out ONE stuff and let students know what they could do to help in the fight for the world’s poorest people. All in all it was a great stop for the bus where we recruited 220 new members to ONE in two hours- not bad for a lunch break!
Yesterday, the FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN) announced that in the past year alone, rising food prices have “plunged an additional 75 million people below the hunger threshold,” pushing the number of malnourished people around the world up to 923 million. The news comes less than a week before international leaders gather to focus on progress towards the Millennium Development Goals at the annual UN General Assembly in New York, where issues of hunger and food security are expected to be high on the agenda.
These statistics place even more weight on next week’s meetings and give new urgency to ONE’s call for global leaders to fill the 2008 food and agriculture funding gap of $1 billion that will provide life-saving food and essential seeds and fertilizer to the 30 countries that need it most.
If you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign our petition to fill the funding gap by asking leaders of the G8 nations and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to commit to providing the needed money.
“Reducing the number of hungry people by 500 million in the remaining 7 years to 2015 will require an enormous and resolute global effort and concrete actions,” said Ghanem.
To break the hunger-poverty trap, action is urgently needed on two fronts, FAO says – making food accessible to the most vulnerable, and helping small producers raise their output and earn more.
FAO’s twin-track approach aims to create opportunities for the hungry to improve their livelihoods by promoting agricultural and rural development. It also involves policies and programmes, such as social safety nets, which enhance direct and immediate access to food by the hungry.
It felt like the first day of fall in Media, PA on Tuesday when Senator Joe Biden addressed a crowd of thousands of supporters at the Linvilla Orchards. The outdoor venue was covered with fallen leaves and the stage sat in front of a trailer full of pumpkins. Senator Biden and Dr. Jill Biden stayed to greet the attendees who sat on hay and picnic tables during the speech.
I handed Dr. Biden a ONE band; she thanked me enthusiastically and immediately put it on! When Senator Biden approached and I held out the white band he laughed, “I already have so many ONE bands. I need to start wearing one regularly!” Sounds like a good idea to me!
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Cuts to poverty-fighting programs won't balance the budget, but they will set back progress on Canada's development priorities and risk jeopardizing existing investments.
2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
