Archive for February, 2008
Tomorrow is ONE Day!This is just a reminder that tomorrow is the first day of the month of March, which means it is ONE Day! So be sure to wear your t-shirts and bands, and to change your facebook status to say “Happy ONE Day! www.ONE.org/campus.” Since tomorrow is a Saturday it might not be effective to table, but be sure to tell people what day it is and why you are wearing ONE stuff. Have a Happy ONE Day! Nick Stevens, ONE Regional Outreach Ambassador Public Enemy Supports ONE “There is only one race, people-the human race.” Chuck D said. “Culture brings humans together because of their similarities and suppresses their differences.”
Afterwards, I caught up with Chuck D to tell him aboout the ONE Campaign and give him a band. He was very supportive and posed for a picture with me and some of the other ONE Webster members while sporting his new ONE band. Nick Stevens, ONEstl Co-chair and ONE Webster President Winning Friends
We got a great picture this week from Western Kentucky, but it comes with an even better story:
Great work! Taking a defeat and turning it right around into a victory like that is exactly the type of effort it is going to take to win in the final round of 10. Bush in AfricaIn the U.S. we usually call rural, undeveloped land either “the middle of nowhere” or home, depending on perspective. In Africa they call it the bush, but it seems every mention of a Bush these days is referring to George W. or Laura. The president recently toured Africa generating a storm of media attention and plenty of posts on the sister blog to this one. Most of the coverage focused on the president’s legacy in Africa with PEPFAR for AIDS, the malaria intiative, debt relief commitments in 2005, and the development of the Millennium Challenge Corporation in 2002. The fact that many people who voted against him twice and several papers who endorsed his opponents are now some of his biggest supporters on these programs says a lot about the power of ONE’s issues to unify people. The Kaiser Family Foundation put together a list of some of the editorials on the trip to Africa available below. http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_hiv.cfm#50551 One in particular I liked was an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. One of the main themes of this election cycle is change and this op-ed looks toward the future and what changes are needed to improve upon these programs in the next administration. – Steve Getting 100,000
Please take a second to sign the petition if you haven’t yet, and tell your friends to do the same. Changes on ONE.org/campusFirst and foremost, since the competition is no longer about how many points you can accrue, the points page has been renamed Take Action. You’ll find the old familiar list of actions here, and you are still able to report your actions like you used to. And please do keep reporting! We love having your stories and photos to help demonstrate just how large and effective the anti-poverty movement is. Second, we’ve swapped the link to the standings page with a link pointing right here, the OCC Blog. Now that the round of points is over, the standings page doesn’t tell the story of what’s going on campuses around the country nearly as well as the OCC Blog. I hope you enjoy the changes, let me know if there is anything else you would like to see happen. The Top 10After almost 5 months of open competition, we’re now narrowing the competition down to the top ten schools:
Each school will receive a $1,000 grant to create their own poverty advocacy program. Thank you all for waiting patiently while we processed points. We know that the leader board might shift around a little, but at the point that we cut off the competition (Monday) these were the schools that made the cut for the final 10. This doesn’t mean that the competition is over for everyone else. If you didn’t make the top ten, you can still create you very own advocacy project and submit it for a chance at a “wild card” spot. In late March when we all vote for the final winner, we’ll include the wild card entry in with the top 10 schools for voting. Though the competition of the Campus Challenge is narrowing, the larger competition against extreme poverty is far from over. We’ve got lots of work to do, and it is crucial that we all continue to do the work we have done during the campus challenge, even if the fun and games are coming to a close. Wealth and HealthThe conventional wisdom is that richer people tend to live longer and poor people tend to die young because of their poverty. Its a sensible theory–rich people can afford better medicines, doctors, preventive medicine, and have more knowledge of emergency care options. But the reality is a little more complicated. A new report from ONE partner Save the Children explores this issue as reported by the BBC. The full report is available here. The major finding is that “development” does not necessarily ensure low child morality, with India being a case in point. This general relationship however is nothing new: data we have shown a complex relationship for decades with income strongly correlated with wealth up to around $5,000 income, but after this point little relationship (interestingly the same pattern exists for happiness surveys). After that point income inequality seems to be a more dominant factor with steep gradients of inequality paired with steep gradients in life expectancy. The U.S.’s best example is the D.C. metro area, where life expectancy jumps a couple decades as you move northwest from the inner-city southeast to the suburbs of Northern Virginia. Fortunately, there are bills in both the House and the Senate, both named the Global Child Survival Act that would do more to address the fact that about 10 million little children die each year of preventable disease. And you can make a difference by writing to Congress to promote the passage of the bill at this crucial time. Better Than The RestEvery school that did a competitive entry into the final weekly challenge used phone calls as their weapon of choice for making their voices heard. And though several schools placed hundreds of calls, UNLV did it the best. The Rebels gathered together a core group of people of people for a marathon phone bank calling all of their members of Congress on each of ONE’s key pieces of legislation. With a grand total of 540 phone calls, they have certainly shown that they know who to bring people together to take effective action. Good luck to UNLV and everyone else as we head into the final round of the competition. On Fire
A handful of schools went all out in a final recruitment drive help clench a spot in the top ten. When I looked up the numbers I was blown away by the lengths the top 4 recruiters went in the final week.
Normally you would think that recruiting over 250 people in a single week would be good enough to win the weekly recruitment challenge, but not so. Western Kentucky is on fire, and they have been for about a month now. The question is: can they keep it up long enough to win it all? AboutThe OCC Blog is a daily log of the ONE Campus Challenge, a friendly competition to determine which university's student body has the most effective global poverty-fighting campaign. The site is operated by ONE staff, Campus Outreach Ambassadors (COAs), and Campus Leaders. The content of each post represents the views of that post's author and does not necessarily reflect the views of ONE. ONE does not support or oppose any candidate for elected office, and any post expressing support or opposition for a candidate is not endorsed by ONE.
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Public Enemy frontman Chuck D visited Webster University on Monday to talk about “Race, Rap and Reality.” This title encompassed numerous topics including media, the music industry, politics, and a lot on history and culture.
“If you don’t have one, get a passport!” he continuosly told the audience. He said that less than 25 percent of Americans have a passport and only 30 percent of congress have passports. I thought this was interesting given ONE’s current campaign which is calling on presidential candidates to promise to travel to Africa during their first term.
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