"Stand Up" House Parties 2006

Overview

At a critical moment before the 2006 midterm elections and in honor of the first Global Day of Action against poverty on October 15, more than 6,000 ONE members across all 50 states gathered at 689  house parties to "Stand Up" against global poverty.

Globally, the Millennium Campaign and the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) initiated "Stand Up" (http://www.standagainstpoverty.org/). Their purpose was to raise awareness about the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the root causes of poverty, as well as to publicly demonstrate to policy makers the growing global support for strengthening development policies and achieving and exceeding the MDGs.

ONE members in the United States organized their "Stand Up" events as house parties with two purposes: to gather to educate each other about extreme poverty, global AIDS and the November elections; and to hold phone banks for calling local candidates and asking what they have done and plan to do to fight global poverty, urging them to support the Jubilee Act of 2005-6 calling for debt relief for some of the world's poorest nations. Our goal was to start a public dialogue about global poverty, with thousands of people talking about ONE issues in living rooms and places of worship across the country.

Outside the U.S., people of all ages, nationalities and religions joined in standing up against global poverty. As in the United States, individual countries were able to craft "Stand Up" actions locally. Among those holding "Stand Up" events were a gathering of children from Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank; a Day of Worship in Malawi; a "Stand Up" concert in Jaipur, India; a huge human chain in South Korea; 1,000 cyclists carrying the "Stand Up Against Poverty" message across 100 kilometers in Sri Lanka; and in tsunami-stricken Aceh Province, Indonesia, schoolchildren also stood up to express their commitment to the fight against poverty.

Altogether, 23.5 million people around the world "Stood Up" for one minute, each adding their voices to a 24-hour global call for world leaders to make poverty history. Together, we set a Guinness World Record for "the largest single coordinated movement of people in history." That record has since been broken by "Stand Up and Take Action" events in 2007 and again in 2008 -- evidence of the lasting impact of the conversation on global poverty we helped begin in October 2006.