ONE is proud to announce Wofford College in South Carolina as the 2008-09 ONE Campus Challenge (OCC) champions. Big congrats go out to ONE-Wofford, and also to the runner-up schools: the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and the University of Florida.

Since September, students across the United States have been competing for the top OCC honors through weekly challenges, advocacy initiatives, and awareness-raising activities all in the fight against global poverty.

In March, we announced our Top 10 schools, each of which received a $1,000 grant towards creating an on-campus anti-poverty project. The projects were evaluated by a combination of scores from a ONE staff judging panel and online votes.

Wofford’s Campus Leader Tomas Moreno, Vice President Sarah Moore, Secretary Jessica Grantham, and Treasurer Christine Shelton put together an outstanding project. Themed “ONE Week to Change the World,” it included teaching about ONE’s issues in 29 classes across 10+ majors, a rally and trivia night, an art contest, a film screening, outreach to sports teams, an interfaith ONE Sabbath, a panel discussion on trade and microcredit, partnerships with several other campus groups, fundraising for three charities and advocacy work on two different pieces of legislation.

The ONE judging panel was impressed with ONE-Wofford’s balance of activities, their focus on laying a strong foundation for OCC’s future on their campus, and their inclusion of ONE’s core issues in a highly relevant way. The Wofford team’s ability to think “outside the box” in terms of overcoming their obstacles and reaching out to a variety of groups also made their project stand out.

Recognizing they might not be able to net as many petition signatures as a larger school, ONE-Wofford ran TWO advocacy initiatives, around both the Global Food Security Act and the Foreign Assistance Act. By running two petitions, the Wofford OCC chapter effectively doubled its impact, and brought in nearly 400 signatures on each petition.

ONE-Wofford further magnified their potential to change the world by joining forces with other campus organizations, departments, and official ONE partners. They worked with their Biology Department to help run an ice cream promotion for their “Sons of Lwala” film screening. They tapped their Sports Marketing Team to help promote ONE at several sporting events. They collaborated with Amnesty International to put on a showing of “The Vagina Monologues” with a focus on women in the developing world, and with Oxfam America to include ONE issues in their Capitol Hill Lobby Day. And they reached out to students of the Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist faiths with a ONE Sabbath event demonstrating the importance of giving regardless of faith background.

In short, ONE-Wofford employed every available resource, turned their small student body size into an advantage, had both breadth and depth to their events, and created partnerships and momentum that will keep ONE’s message alive at Wofford long after the current students have graduated.

Congratulations to Wofford College, our 2008-9 ONE Campus Challenge champs!

-Emily Stivers

The ONE Campus Challenge (OCC) is pleased to present the final projects from the Top 10 global poverty-fighting colleges and universities in the nation. These students have logged countless hours on their projects, and now it’s your turn to be the judge.

Vote for your favorite project here before midnight PST on Sunday, April 5.

ONE gave each school $1,000 and three weeks to develop an on-campus awareness-raising and advocacy initiative aimed at fighting global poverty and preventable diseases. We asked them to apply all the skills they’ve gained all year in event planning, grassroots coordination, media and multi-media communications, lobbying, and educating the public about ONE issues. These students — some of the top poverty-fighters in the country — have submitted exceptional projects showcasing the creativity, passion and motivation of the next generation of advocates and change-makers.

But there can only be ONE winning school, and we need you to help us decide. Check out the projects and vote for your favorite here.

Your votes will count for 40% of the total scores, with our judging panel’s evaluations making up the other 60%. You can only vote once per email address. It takes our system about five minutes to tabulate the votes, so don’t worry if yours doesn’t appear on the results page right away.

What should you be looking for when casting your vote? Think about:

- Scope: was the project ambitious enough? Too ambitious? Were there a variety of activities but not so many that the message was diluted?

- Relevance: did the project conform to ONE’s mission and relate to extreme global poverty, infectious diseases and related issues?

- Level of Engagement: how deep did this project delve into ONE’s issues?

- Impact: how did the community respond to the actions? How many people were reached? Was there an advocacy effort, and was it successful?

- Creativity: did the chapter use creative methods and step “outside the box” to reach out to new members and raise awareness about ONE?

Besides the prestige of being the Number ONE school in the nation, the winning school gets a free campus concert by the hot new rock band, Vampire Weekend.

Consider all the projects and vote for your favorite here.

-Emily Stivers

Today, we’re announcing the names of the top 20 leading student in ONE’s campus outreach program, The ONE Campus Challenge (OCC).

These 20 students earned hundreds of thousands of “OCC points” for actions including visits to congressional offices to advocate on behalf of ONE, signing petitions, recruiting new members and raising awareness about ONE issues on their campuses.

They are:

1 Nick Stevens, Webster University
2 Justin Kralemann, Baylor University
3 Tomas Moreno, Wofford College
4 Mike Fazzino, Sacred Heart University
5 Andrea Netti, Southern Methodist University
6 Hassan Barzani, University of Texas at San Antonio
7 Rachel Berman-Vaporis, Brandeis University
8 Kelly Wynveen, Clark University
9 Mike Weidman, Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio
10 Jessica Beckner, Indiana University
11 Steven Thai, Luther College
12 Stephanie Parrish, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
13 Eric Mayle, Missouri State University
14 Bryant Shannon, University of Florida
15 Audrey Ruark, Kennesaw State University
16 Erin Burke, Sacred Heart University
17 Harpreet Kaur, Saint John’s University, Jamaica New York
18 Christie Fleming Franciscan, University of Steubenville
19 Caitlin Harrowby, Maui Community College
20 Genevieve Gearity, Emerson College

For the next stage of the competition, the Top 20 will submit applications and creative projects answering the question, “How Will You Bring Africa to the OCC?” These projects will be evaluated by two judging panels, one made up of ONE staff and a second external to the organization. The students have until April 19th to submit their projects, which can be any combination of video, essay, music or other artistic expression.

The 5 students with the best projects, as determined by our judging panels, will be invited on a once-in-a-lifetime, week-long trip to Kenya with ONE staff in July or August (dates TBD).

In the event that anyone in the Top 20 withdraws from the competition or fails to submit a project, the projects of one or more “alternates” will be considered. These students are:

21 Melissa Boles, Washington State University – Vancouver
22 Olivia Durning, Sacred Heart University
23 Victoria Roman, George Washington University

Congratulations to the OCC Top 20 and alternates!

For more information, check out the OCC blog.

-Maisie Pigeon

Ron Brownstein of the National Journal has published a great piece today about ONE Campus Challenge Power 100 Summit, a conference of 100 college student ONE leaders which we hosted in DC last weekend. Having conducted interviews with a number of the students who attended, Brownstein speculates that “Millennials may balance idealism and pragmatism better than either Baby Boomers or Generation X-ers.” You can read more about this year’s Power 100 Summit here.

Excerpts below, full piece here

Among the students who filled a seminar room for discussions on organizing techniques or international development was a delegation from Curry College, near Boston, that was led by John Abdulla, a senior. Abdulla became interested in global poverty when he heard Bono tout ONE during a U2 concert in 2005. After talking with Sudanese refugees attending his school, Abdulla focused his energy on building a well to provide clean drinking water for a village in Sudan. Through two years of arduous fundraising, he persevered with fellow students to collect $5,000 toward the well’s $10,000 cost; then a donor agreed to match their contributions. Now a nonprofit group is scheduled to build the well this spring. “Through all that,” Abdulla says, “I never imagined we wouldn’t do the well.”

Also in the room last weekend was Justin Kralemann, a Baylor University junior. Kralemann’s interest in poverty was crystallized when he joined his mother on a business trip to China. Looking through their car’s rolled-up windows, he saw an anguished mother holding a malnourished child and felt painfully “isolated” behind the glass. Although his Texas university is considered a conservative campus, Kralemann has enlisted 1,200 supporters for ONE, which pushes for more foreign aid and reform in developing countries. “I feel these issues can be tackled,” Kralemann says, gesturing toward the seminar room, “and there are 99 other people in there who agree with me.”

-Chris Scott

I met with William and Mary students on campus yesterday at a Rotaract meeting. Rotaract is a university-based Rotary-sponsored service club and their international activism parallels ONE’s mission to fight global poverty and injustice. The Williamsburg club even hosted the ONE bus in September as it toured college towns around the country!

Now W&M Rotaract and ONE members are ready for a challenge – the ONE Campus Challenge! During the meeting they brainstormed ideas for a spring semester packed with awareness-raising events and service projects. I’m looking forward to our collaboration and can’t wait to see members of the Tribe at the Power 100 Summit in 2010!

-Lauren Conn, ONE Field Organizer

The 2008-9 ONE Campus Challenge (OCC) — a friendly competition between college-level global anti-poverty advocates — is going strong. So far, more than 27,000 students representing 2,458 different schools have submitted nearly 45,000 individual actions.

Those actions include holding meetings on issues related to global poverty; collecting petition signatures and making phone calls to Members of Congress; promoting ONE on campus through hanging banners, dressing school mascots in ONE gear, and helping to make global poverty part of school curriculum.

In December, we tallied up the points and narrowed it down to the top 100 schools in the country, and asked each school to send one representative to the Power 100 Summit: three days of training, education, inspiration and fun this weekend, February 6-9.

We will have VIP speakers (including last week’s ABC’s World News Persons of the Week) on a variety of our issues; workshops with ONE staff on topics such as the Obama Administration, New Media, and student organizing; and on Monday, our first ever “Lobby Day” where students will meet with Members of Congress to discuss extreme poverty and preventable diseases.

During the Summit, we will also be announcing the exciting OCC grand prizes for 2009, both for the top school and the top individual action-takers.

Keep an eye on the OCC blog for more updates.

-Emily Stivers

It’s time to kick off a new year of the ONE Campus Challenge, and we’re calling all students, alumni and college fans to sign up under your favorite school’s banner on our OCC website.

I’m Maisie Pigeon, ONE’s Student Coordinator, and I’ll be managing this year’s OCC—a good-natured competition between universities to see which school will be the national champion at tackling extreme poverty.

Our quarterback is three-time Super Bowl winner and two-time Super Bowl MVP Tom Brady of the New England Patriots. An active ONE supporter since 2005, Tom visited health clinics, schools and other life-saving projects in Ghana and Uganda in 2007 with ONE. Hear what he has to say about OCC at:

Last year, more than 1,400 colleges and universities competed through seven months of rigorous activism, awareness-raising and action-taking. OCC students signed up over 33,000 ONE members, took 182,000 actions, and convinced campuses, cities and even states to declare their support for ONE. And they engaged candidates including Barack Obama and John McCain on the campaign trail, getting them to pay attention to and talk about global poverty and disease.

In January, the 100 top schools sent representatives to the Power 100 Summit, an exciting three-day conference in Washington, D.C. They heard from leaders of the global anti-poverty movement and influential members of the Democratic and Republican parties, and joined forces through workshops and forums to become smarter, stronger advocates.

This year’s ONE Campus Challenge is going to be even better, but we need you to help your school get started. Sign up here.

Game on!

-Maisie Pigeon and the OCC Team

Greetings, ONE members!

My name is Maisie Pigeon and I’m the new ONE Student Coordinator. Right now, I’m working non-stop to make this year’s ONE Campus Challenge a success. The ONE Campus Challenge is a nationwide competition between universities where schools have the opportunity to earn points by taking actions against poverty. (Actions range from signing up your friends and family, to “ONE-ing” your campus mascot, to writing letters to your members of Congress.)

Currently we are working to get everything ready for the OCC 2008/2009-kickoff. The competition between schools last year was pretty steep, in the end Western Kentucky University won out over more than a thousand schools nationwide. This year the competition only looks to intensify. We can’t wait to see what tricks you guys have up your sleeves!

This will be my second year working with OCC, as I was a Regional Outreach Ambassador (aka – ROA) last year. I want to let you know that we’re currently looking to fill positions for this year’s crew of Regional Outreach Ambassadors. ROAs are active student leaders who help college students across the country promote ONE and fight extreme poverty by acting as liaisons between ONE staff and ONE student leaders across the country.

Find more information on becoming a ROA and pick up an application here. And stay tuned to the ONE Blog for more updates on OCC in the coming weeks.

-Maisie Pigeon, ONE Student Coordinator

Since September, more than 1,400 college campuses have been battling it out in the ONE Campus Challenge. In the end, one school was unstoppable.

Western Kentucky University beat out the competition by recruiting almost 3,000 students to ONE, writing letters and placing calls to members of Congress and effectively reaching out to the Bowling Green community to join the movement.

On Tuesday night, ONE brought the bands Army of Me and Georgie James to the campus for a free concert. Lots of local news, like the WKU Herald and local TV station WBKO covered the event.

The WKU Herald quotes ONE student organizer Matt Vaughan:

“Way to go, Hilltoppers,” Vaughan said. “3,000 people at Western are now signed up (for the ONE Campaign). That’s an accomplishment no other university could match.” Vaughan said he was happy to sit back and enjoy the concert, but there was still work to be done to end world poverty.

“The spirit of change is alive and well here at WKU,” he said. “For years to come we’re going to have to keep rocking the movement. We can do this and we will do it.”

And WBKO ran this interview with Vaughan Tuesday night.

Note his quote:

“We beat out schools like Princeton and George Washington, all these schools that are known for being globally engaged and active. We showed that you don’t have to go to a rich and elite school in the East Coast to make a difference in this world, everyone can make a difference,” said Matt Vaughan, WKU student organizer.

Congratulations WKU! We can’t wait to see what you guys do next.

Since September, campuses across the country have been creating ONE chapters and spurring global poverty action as part of the ONE Campus Challenge (OCC).

In just 12 hours after launching OCC, 1000 ONE Chapters were formed. Today, there are now more than 1,400 student-led ONE groups covering all 50 states.

Throughout the competition, colleges earned points for actions – like hosting speaking events, creating public displays on campus that raise awareness, contacting members of Congress and overall recruitment. All in all, these students made more than 10,000 calls to Congress, 2,000 calls to presidential candidates, provided needed support for the Jubilee Act, and successfully helped urge the IMF to honor their promise to provide debt relief to Liberia.

Finally, late last week Erin and Weldon announced the top ten point-earning schools:

Brandeis University; Campbellsville University; George Washington University; Hofstra University; Kansas State University; Princeton University; Sacred Heart University; University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Western Kentucky University; and Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio.

Each of these schools are receiving a $1,000 grant from ONE to craft their own poverty advocacy project.

I’m looking forward to learning how they use them – and will let you know when I do.

-Virginia Simmons