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

Emily Stivers is currently blogging about this weekend’s OCC Power 100 Summit in Washington, DC on the ONE Campus Challenge blog. There are a lot of great things going on– be sure to check it out!

-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

The second annual ONE Campus Challenge – a friendly competition between colleges and universities to raise campus awareness about extreme poverty and disease – is in full swing. OCC has just completed its first stage with the announcement of the 2009 Power 100: the top 100 schools sending representatives to our elite Power 100 Summit in February. You can see if your school made the list here.

Throughout the school year, we’ve featured weekly challenges for all universities participating in OCC. Challenge winners get 10,000 OCC points, which add up to qualify them for the Power 100 and later, the top 10 schools getting $1,000 each to design their own global anti-poverty programs. We’ve had 10 challenges over three months, including two “Super Challenges” worth double the points and each spanning two weeks. Here’s a recap of all our challenges and winners:

Challenge 1: Campus Launch
Winner: University of Michigan

Challenge 2: Scavenger Hunt
Winner: Curry College

Challenge 3: T-shirt Design
Winner: Baylor University

Challenge 4: “Stand Up and Take Action” Event
Winner: Western Kentucky University

Challenge 5: ONE Your Candidates
Winner: Western Kentucky University

Challenge 6: Halloween Photo Contest
Winner: University of Florida

Challenge 7: ONE in Your Face
Winner: University of Michigan

Challenge 8: ONE Story/Book
Winner: University of Missouri-Columbia

Challenge 9: Call Congress
Winner: University of Southern California

Challenge 10: World AIDS Day Event
Winner: George Washington University

So far during the second OCC season, we’ve amassed more than 27,000 participants representing 2,548 different schools, and the PR News Nonprofit Awards recognized OCC as one of the top advocacy campaigns in the country for 2008.

Remember you can still earn points for your favorite school by signing up for the ONE Campus Challenge here. Congratulations to all OCC participants for a great year! Let’s make 2009 even better.

-Emily Stivers

ONE- Baylor recently had an opportunity to band a celebrity when he visited the university. Lieutenant Andy Baldwin, MD, most known for being ‘The Bachelor’ on ABC’s TV program, was happy to wear a band in support of ONE. Lt Baldwin is a Navy physician and earned the Humanitarian of the Year award from Triathlete and Competitor magazines for his participation on a military mission in Laos, where he treated more than 600 Laotians in remote mountain villages.

As the ONE Campus Challenge heats up, Baylor University has been working hard to spread ONE’s message in the fight against extreme poverty. From helping out in our community to snapping some great pictures along the way we had a great 2008 and looking forward to an even better 2009!

-Justin Kralemann, Baylor University

This is it. We’re officially announcing the top schools invited to attend the ONE Campus Challenge Power 100 Summit this February in Washington, D.C. See if your school made the list.

The Power 100 Summit is an amazing experience. Campus Leaders from the 100 top schools will get transportation and most expenses paid for three days in our nation’s capitol. They’ll hear from top members of the global poverty movement, influential members of the Democratic and Republican parties, and ONE staff. And new this year, we’ll be visiting Congressional offices for a full day of hands-on advocacy training.

Last year’s Power 100 Summit speakers included global poverty experts Steve Radelet and Gene Sperling, Former Senator Majority leader Bill Frist, Democratic strategist Paul Begala, First Daughter Jenna Bush, and of course Doug and Graham Walker, the founders of “The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide.” We can’t announce all of this year’s speakers just yet, but we know it’s going to be a pretty impressive list. Find out if your school made the cut.

Congratulations to the top 100 qualifying schools!

-Emily Stivers