This weekend was the annual Global Day of Action when people all of the world Stand Up and Take Action to end global poverty and at last night’s U2 concert in Norman, Oklahoma, 50,000+ U2 fans stood up to show their support.

They’re joining millions of people around the world – a Guinness Book of World Records 116 million stood up last year! – to show solidarity with the world’s poorest people and demand action on meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of halving poverty and disease worldwide by 2015.

Check out ONE members Standing Up at the show, after a long day of taking action against global poverty and signing up more than 2,000 new ONE members:

-Aaron Banks

In Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, ONE co-founder Bono has an op-ed column entitled “Rebranding America.” Part of his series with the paper, the column focuses on President Obama’s September speech at the UN, in which he re-committed America to the Millennium Development Goals. Specifically, Bono highlights these 36 words from the President:

We will support the Millennium Development Goals, and approach next year’s summit with a global plan to make them a reality. And we will set our sights on the eradication of extreme poverty in our time.

Excerpts from the piece below. You can read the full column here.

They’re not my words, they’re your president’s. If they’re not familiar, it’s because they didn’t make many headlines. But for me, these 36 words are why I believe Mr. Obama could well be a force for peace and prosperity — if the words signal action.

The millennium goals, for those of you who don’t know, are a persistent nag of a noble, global compact. They’re a set of commitments we all made nine years ago whose goal is to halve extreme poverty by 2015. Barack Obama wasn’t there in 2000, but he’s there now. Indeed he’s gone further — all the way, in fact. Halve it, he says, then end it.

Many have spoken about the need for a rebranding of America. Rebrand, restart, reboot. In my view these 36 words, alongside the administration’s approach to fighting nuclear proliferation and climate change, improving relations in the Middle East and, by the way, creating jobs and providing health care at home, are rebranding in action.

These new steps — and those 36 words — remind the world that America is not just a country but an idea, a great idea about opportunity for all and responsibility to your fellow man.

On Sunday night in New York City, our friends at (RED) hosted “Hal Willner Presents: An Evening with Gavin Friday and Friends,” a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall.

In part a birthday celebration for Gavin Friday, a notable Irish musician in his own right, the night welcomed an array of performers and was also part of the (RED)NIGHTS concert series, generating support and awareness of (RED)’s goal to eliminate AIDS in Africa. Learn more about (RED)NIGHTS here.

As the evening unfolded, the members of U2, Scarlett Johansson, Shane MacGowan of the Pogues, Lady Gaga and Rufus Wainwright and others all took their turns on stage. Lou Reed also stopped in for an impromptu performance along with his wife Laurie Anderson and numerous other special guests.

What a show.

You can read more about it here.

-Chris Geer, NY Field Organizer

You’re not going to want to miss “An Evening with Gavin Friday,” a star-studded concert our friends at (RED) are hosting this Sunday, October 4 at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

The concert features Laurie Anderson, Antony, Elizabeth Ashley, Bono, Adam Clayton, Andrea Corr, The Edge, Flo & Eddie, Joel Grey, Bill Frisell, Guggi, Scarlett Johansson, Shane MacGowan, Eric Mingus, Larry Mullen Jr., JG Thirlwell, Martha Wainwright, Rufus Wainwright, Chloe Webb, plus other special guests.

You can buy tickets to the show here.

Hal Willner presents an “Evening with Gavin Friday and Friends” which is part of the (RED)NIGHTS concert series. Each show contributes a portion of the proceeds directly to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. You can learn more about the (RED)NIGHTS series here.

Hope to see you at the show Sunday.

-Chris Geer

I just returned from the U2 show at FedEx Field just outside of Washington, DC and as anyone who’s been to a concert on the U2 360 Tour can attest to, it was quite an amazing experience.

In front of a sold out crowd, Bono dedicated the song “One” to the United States congress and the leadership of President Bush “for the 4 million souls that are now very much alive because of ARV drugs paid for by the United States…God Bless America.” He mentioned people in the audience who had lost friends or relatives to AIDS in America and singled out Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband Paul, who were early campaigners against the pandemic in San Francisco. Bono also praised President Obama’s commitment to the fight against poverty in Africa and paid special respects to Senator Ted Kennedy for his leadership on peace in Northern Ireland and Eunice Kennedy for being a mentor to him.

Behind the scenes, ONE members and volunteers were busy spreading ONE’s message and recruiting new members in the fight against extreme poverty. Our efforts were no doubt greatly supported by Bono’s several shout-outs to ONE and the hard work of millions of people around the world to end global poverty.

We’ll have more tomorrow including pictures and one-on-one interviews with some of the fantastic ONE volunteers we met.

-Chris Scott

Last week, while attending the Clinton Global Initiative meeting, I saw Jessica Alba join Bono, Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan and others onstage to pledge commitment to 1GOAL: Education for All. It was a really cool moment in a week full of really cool moments, which I wrote about here.

Today Jessica Alba has a great article in the Huffington Post reflecting on CGI, global education, and 1GOAL. Excerpts below, full piece here. We’ll have more on 1GOAL soon!

I was part of a CGI commitment with 1GOAL: Education for All to talk about the 75 million children denied access to education around the world today. If you’re keeping count, that’s as if every school in the U.S. and Europe combined decided one day to close their doors. Joining Global Co-Chair Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, ONE co-founder Bono, FIFA and private sector leaders, I signed up to be US Co-Chair of 1GOAL and help work for a breakthrough on global education centered around the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

The 2010 World Cup will be the first hosted by Africa, and 1GOAL views the world’s biggest sporting event as an opportune platform to persuade the millions of fans who peacefully come together to share the love of soccer to also unite on educating the world’s children. Our goal is to sign up 30 million World Cup supporters to call on our leaders to make education for all children a priority and reality. Name by name, we believe we can bring attention to global education disparities and make change a reality.

In the US we take for granted that our children have a right to education and the opportunities education provides. But for tens of millions of kids in the developing world, children who are just like our kids, the chance for an education is a hope and a dream, but not yet a reality. These could be our next generation’s leaders, athletes, doctors, teachers, and parents. They’re ready to do their homework, but school fees, conflict, working in factories and farms, losing their parents to sickness, the cost of a school uniform or simply being a girl can keep them from being able to attend school.

Bono, ONE co-founder, just joined Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan and others in a commitment to 1GOAL: Education for All at the Clinton Global Initiative Meeting. Together with FIFA, 1GOAL is committed to ensuring that the legacy of the 2010 World Cup will be universal access to education for all children. As President Clinton said, “this is a staggering opportunity” to make a big difference for girls and boys around the world.

Read more about 1GOAL Education for All here.

After the announcement, Queen Rania immediately joined a panel moderated by Nicholas Kristof and went on to further make a passionate case for universal education. According to Queen Rania, an educated child is 50% less likely to contract HIV, just one of many ways education affects every other sector. She also pointed out another statistic so incredible that Nicholas Kristof made her repeat it: the developing world needs approximately $11 billion dollars to put every child into primary school– the same amount the US spends every 3 months on their pets. However, because education isn’t particularly “dramatic” it rarely gets the attention it deserves.

Nicholas Kristof, Queen Rania, and Hilda Solis join in a panel on Creating Good Jobs and Strong Communities

US Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis addresses the CGI Meeting

-Chris Scott

Recently, Willow Creek’s Pastor Bill Hybels sat down with Bono at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit for a conversation, amongst other things, on the church’s role in the fight against extreme poverty. Reflecting on his conversation, Pastor Hybels wrote “What Bono Taught Me About Fighting Poverty” this week in US News and World Report.

“Nearly two weeks ago, I stood before 7,000 people—and an additional 60,000 connected via satellite feed—who gathered for the Willow Creek Association’s annual two-day conference the Global Leadership Summit to hear from diverse faculty on the subject of how to get better at leading whatever it is that we lead. Part of the assortment this year included Bono, who agreed to a follow-up discussion to our 2006 interview, during which he called out the local church for being inexcusably late to the game of fighting extreme poverty and treatable disease.

The evangelical church has taken a lot of justifiable heat in recent years for being vocal about the things we hate while staying silent about some of the most pressing needs in our world. There are times when I believe the church should be the conscience of our culture, but to Bono’s point, a reframing must occur, one where the divisiveness that once defined us as people of faith gets edged out by a unity around great societal causes. And what has to unite us in this day and age is the fight against poverty and disease. Faith leaders the world over expected this day would come. What we didn’t expect was that it would take an Irish rock star to demand the dawn.

Since Bono’s clarion call three years ago, well-resourced churches have banded together to take a bite out of poverty, pouring vast amounts of resources into building orphanages, clinics, schools, and sports fields through partnerships with underresourced churches around the globe. Not that the ultimate judge comes in the form of a leather-clad superstar in shades, but still it was gratifying to hear Bono’s assessment of progress to date: “I knew [the church] was a sleeping giant, but I didn’t know the giant could run so fast.”

In some parts of Africa, malaria deaths have been halved. Antiretroviral drugs are being shipping back because villagers have what they need. Education is having an effect. These are all good changes, but admittedly more must be done….”

Full article may be found here.

-Adam Phillips

ONE co-founder Bono wrote a great a column for the New York Times today about President Obama’s historic visit to Ghana this weekend. Bono writes about the relationship between the U.S. and Africa and about how countries like Ghana, with its peaceful transition of power and growing business sector, are challenging old stereotypes about Africa.

The Times also links to our brand new “Yes, Africa Can” video about Ghana. The video, which we shot in Ghana just a few weeks ago, includes Ghanaians talking about their views of Ghana today and their excitement about President Obama’s trip.

In his column Bono writes:

No one’s leaked me a copy of the president’s speech in Ghana, but it’s pretty clear he’s going to focus not on the problems that afflict the continent but on the opportunities of an Africa on the rise. If that’s what he does, the biggest cheers will come from members of the growing African middle class, who are fed up with being patronized and hearing the song of their majestic continent in a minor key.

I’ve played that tune. I’ve talked of tragedy, of emergency. And it is an emergency when almost 2,000 children in Africa a day die of a mosquito bite; this kind of hemorrhaging of human capital is not something we can accept as normal.

But as the example of Ghana makes clear, that’s only one chord. Amid poverty and disease are opportunities for investment and growth — investment and growth that won’t eliminate overnight the need for assistance, much as we and Africans yearn for it to end, but that in time can build roads, schools and power grids and propel commerce to the point where aid is replaced by trade pacts, business deals and home-grown income.

Read Bono’s full Op-Ed on the New York Times website.

-Kathy McKiernan

Thanks to U2’s support of ONE, we’ve been given a chance to work with their current 360 tour. We’ve been working on this for months now, and finally, yesterday, we saw the first show.

I arrived last Friday to put together ONE’s booths at the concert and coordinate our volunteers. I’ve never seen a rock concert in the making, much less a stadium show for a crowd of 90,000. Within 10 minutes of arrival I was standing at the front of the stage looking out into an enormous sea of empty seats. The scale of the whole thing was overwhelming — and that was without lights, sound, or a crowd.

Between Friday and the first show yesterday, I worked on getting together the ONE booth and lining up volunteers for the shows. We have two booths at the venues where volunteers explain ONE and invite people to join up. New members get one of our special edition ONE wristbands, and can have their photos taken as part of “The Future Needs a Big Kiss” – a concept that fits perfectly with ONE’s optimistic view of shaping and embracing the future. The band are using these pictures in a segment of the show, so there is a chance that the best kissers and huggers will end up seeing themselves on the ginormous IMAG screen during the show.

Monday afternoon we ducked outside of the front gates where loyal fans had been queuing for days to ensure they got the best spot next to the stage when the gates opened. The fans came from all over the world, from Spain to Ireland to Chile. Lots of smooching going on. I think some new aquaintances may have occurred. One fan appeared at the photo booth dejected that she didn’t have anyone to kiss. A group of willing volunteers wasn’t far behind offering to help remedy that problem.

Tuesday was a long time coming, and my adrenaline kicked in as I watched the gates open and the fans rush in. For the next few hours we signed up as many fans as we could physically talk to, and took over 300 pictures of people giving their kiss to the future. As U2 started up, we packed up our booths as everyone was inside the stadium, and it was high time that we joined them.

The concert itself was stunning. I’d heard the rehearsals, but the show itself was an order of magnitude more powerful, punctuated by a stadium literally shaking as fans jumped up and down to the music. There were some amazing moments of the show that talked about ONE. First, they linked up to the International Space Station and Bono asked Frank de Winne, the UNICEF ambassador and astronaut, to join ONE, which he enthusiastically agreed to — a spaceman has signed up for ONE!! Later on a giant Archbishop Desmond Tutu appeared on the screen, talking about the people who’ve made great social changes throughout history and how we all are those same people, especially when we act together as ONE. And finally, Bono introduced the song “One” with the Kiss the Future photo montage, urging the audience to sign up as they watched the ONE pictures floating across the screen.

I left the show with a silly grin on my face as I packed up all our stuff and headed home for some much needed sleep. With all the excitement I hadn’t realised how much being on my feet all day in the 34 degree celsius heat had taken out of me. It was the best type of tired there is.

Ill be blogging from every show… Next time I’ll be shorter I promise, just wanted to catch you up.

-Weldon Kennedy