Earlier this year, ONE launched ONE Vote 2010, an effort to mobilize voters and engage U.S. Senate candidates in open seats to make the fight against global poverty and disease a key foreign policy and security issue at the 2010 ballot box.
Just like ONE Vote ’08, we asked the candidates to make time for the more than 7,000 Arkansas ONE members and the world’s poorest people and answer our 2010 ONE Vote question:
Q: ONE’s vision for Africa is rooted in a moral and humanitarian desire to help the most vulnerable people, a recognition that building economic opportunities abroad creates opportunities at home, and a strategic understanding that our national security is intertwined with the stability of poor countries across the globe. Through bipartisan cooperation in Washington, the US has been a leader in helping provide millions of Africans with life-saving medicine, children with the chance to go to school, and women with the tools to feed their families, while investing in sustainable economic growth and tackling corruption to ensure scarce resources are used as intended.
How best can the US continue to tackle global disease, poverty, and hunger?
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May 7th, 2010 3:00 PM UTC
By Field
Samantha Platte is a student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and president of the Sigma Iota Rho honor society for international studies. In April she helped organize a week of events to raise awareness about global poverty:
We held events last week starting with general information awareness on Monday and culminating in a documentary film festival on Thursday and Friday. During the week, we also collected canned goods which we donated to the Arkansas Rice Depot, a local food bank. Luckily, the UALR school newspaper The Forum did a front page story prior to our events and we also hung flyers around campus to get people excited! We had a bake sale under the premise of “Feeding You to Feed Others” on Wednesday.
Throughout the week we also had guest speakers and a blood drive on campus. Many professors brought their students to one or more of our films, which really generated a lot of interest. I know I had a lot of questions and interest in ONE, so I hope that students will follow through and sign up on the website or Facebook! I know we have a lot more Arkansans sporting the white ONE bands now!
–Samantha Platte, Arkansas ONE Member
Thursday’s first ever “ONE Student | ONE Vote” event at the University of Central Arkansas was a huge success! Politico’s executive editor and co-founder Jim VandeHei moderated the discussion. The conversation leaders included UCA President Lu Hardin, national security expert with the Century Foundation Jeffrey Laurenti, State Senator Gilbert Baker, UCA professor Dr. Elaine Fox and two UCA students – Brooks Cato, who lived in Tanzania, Thailand and Costa Rica, and Emily Daniel, who participated in relief efforts in Central America.
The conversation covered reasons why students should be involved in the upcoming 2008 presidential elections and all of the different ways that involvement could occur. The conversation then shifted to ways we can become involved in our community to help those who most need our help around the world. Both Emily and Brooks have traveled abroad, as had other members of the panel, and had seen the extremely dire circumstances that many in the world’s poorest countries live in.
The panelists took questions from the student audience of more than 150 UCA students. Among the questions was one from a UCA student from Nigeria, who asked what UCA was doing to expand its study abroad programs. UCA President Hardin responded that it has been one of his top priorities to expand the program, and in the five years he’s been
president, the program has more than doubled in size.
Students left ONE Student | ONE Vote energized and enthusiastic about all of the different ways they could be involved in their community, as students and in the upcoming 2008 election.
-Kimberly Cadena
