We’re back.

Susan McCue, John Ryan, Weldon Kennedy, Aaron Banks, Annisa Wanat and I are back from YearlyKos, the progressive netroot’s yearly conference.

Our mission: to make ONE a presence.
The fact: People kept telling me, “it seems like ONE is everywhere.”

Throughout the weekend
*We hosted a global poverty panel;
*Distributed ONE bands and shirts to each of the 2,000 attendees;
*Held a demonstration outside (expect a post from annisa on it);
*Attended five democratic presidential candidate caucuses (Obama, Edwards, Clinton, Richardson and Dodd); and
*In the process of building a crowd for our panel and talking about global poverty issues at other panels, and in the hallways in between, we did our best to get the word out to every one we saw.

Our panelists

*Susan McCue (ONE’s President);
*Christina Siun (blogger at FireDogLake);
*David Beckmann (Bread for the Word’s President);
*Natalie Sugira (native Rwandan and ONE ambassador); and
*Gene Sperling (Center for Universal Education Director and Global Campaign for Education U.S. Chair)

were remarkable. If you get a chance to see them speak, do.

You can view the first 12 minutes of the panel on this ustream video, and you can check out Matthew Yglesias’ live blog post, from the event.

(Important comment to conservative bloggers: build a conference and ONE will be there!)

David Beckmann of Bread from the World is talking to WMBI live now about his participation on the Aug 4 9:15am global poverty panel at YearlyKos. You can listen live here.

We’ve always known that ending poverty would be no small feat and we’ve been betting that a couple of strategic decisions – like bipartisanship and leveraging technology – will help us turn the pages of history a little faster. Later this week, a few of us from ONE, Weldon Kennedy, John Ryan, Aaron Banks, our CEO Susan McCue and I, will head to Chicago for YearlyKos, the annual superbowl for the progressive netroots.

At the conference, Susan, Bread for the World’s CEO David Beckmann, Rwandan turned U.S. citizen and AIDS lobbyist Anathalie Sugira and FireDogLake blogger Christina Siun O’Connell will speak on a global poverty panel (Aug 4, 9:15am) to urge the 2,000 new media-savvy attendees to become leaders of the cause.

We’ll keep you posted as the event draws closer.