Archive for March, 2008
March 10th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
While only 10 schools are guaranteed spots in the last round of competition to win the Campus Challenge, there will be one “wild card” school that has a chance to win it all. To clench that coveted spot number 1 spot, you’re going to have to be creative, and thoroughly document your efforts.
Here some ideas of things you might try doing:
- Schedule a visit with your district or state congressional office and bus students en mass to the meeting to show them just how many people in their district care about ending poverty.
- Work with your campus media groups to turn the campus paper, radio, and TV into all poverty education and advocacy programming and content for one day.
- Work with your local congressional office on including the member of Congress’s poverty fighting efforts in the next constituent mailing.
- Visit several local high schools and train students on making calls to Congress.
When you turn in your work, we’ll be looking for:
- A description of your project.
- Your goals in doing this project (be more specific than “ending poverty”).
- Your results.
- Some obstacles that you encountered and how you overcame them.
- A multi-media presentation of your efforts.
March 10th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
The numbers for the Fiscal Year 2009 budget are out and as you may have heard the news is mixed. John Ruxin, a public health expert and New York Times blogger, told the story on his blog today–and made a shout out to ONE as the major organization taking action.
But the long and short is this: President Bush gets to request funds to operate the government each year and he requested increases for most programs to fight poverty worldwide (the major exception being Child Survival with a hefty $251 million cut).
Unfortunately, the House thought he budgeted “too much” and cut $1.5 billion. The Senate decided to cut even more–an extra $2.6 billion roughly.
Senators Durbin (D-IL) and Smith (R-OR) decided to take action, drafting an amendment to raise funding to House levels, which isn’t asking much since the House cut $1.5 billion from Bush’s request and Bush only requested about 28% of what he promised back in 2002.
You can sign ONE’s petition here in support of the amendment, and if the cuts to Child Survival funding bother you then send a letter in support of the Child Survival Act.
And calling Congress never hurt. A list of each Senators phone number is available here. Calling only takes 2 minutes but can make a big difference–I’m a Floridian so I’m calling Senator’s Nelson and Martinez after I post this for instance.
March 10th, 2008 at 11:44 am
On Friday, we sent around a petition to the Senate not to slash 4 billion dollars from the international affairs budget. Over the weekend we managed to gather over 54,000 signatures, but if we hope to convince our senators that we can’t roll back the amount we give to the fight against poverty, we’re going to need many more.
If you, or someone you know, hasn’t signed the petition calling on the Senate to restore this vital funding, please sign now and send it to your friends as well.
March 8th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
Economists are fond of saying “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” becuase, if nothing else, you have to sacrifice the time to eat it–and as the saying goes, “time is money.”
But in most schools in the U.S. many students get free (or subsidized) lunches, and the same is true in many parts of developing countries. The programs are generally considered a remarkable success since the food is cheap but the payoff is big with students test scores rising rapidly.
Unfortunately, as The Economist explained in an article a few months ago, the era of cheap food is coming to an end. The long and short of it is that demand is increasing because of corn being used for ethanol (to pretend to reduce global warming pollution–in reality it won’t) and the growing middle classes in Asia eating more meat, which requires about 10 pounds of feed for each pound of meat.
The effect is that the U.S. is scaling back food aid programs due to higher costs and no complementary increase in the budget. It’s a tough situation with no quick fix, but Farm Bill reform or President Bush’s plan to reduce food aid ties would be a start.
Unfortunately Congress has temporarily defeated both proposals. Key word for us: temporarily.
March 7th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Right now, the Senate is considering a $4 billion cut from the president’s 2009 request for poverty-fighting funding. Most devastating – if passed, this cut would be a $1 billion drop from 2008 levels.
Thankfully, Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Gordon Smith (R-OR) have introduced an amendment to restore $2.6 billion to the international affairs budget.
This is where ONE comes in.
We only have a week to get the majority of the Senate to decide to support this amendment – so we’re doing what we do best – launching a petition!
Add your name here.
We’re hoping to get 60 U.S. senators to sign up in support of Senator Durbin and Smith’s amendment – which means we need support from senators in every state in America.
I’ll updates you with how many ONE members have signed the petition, and how many senators have signed on, throughout the week. Please add your name and send the petition on to your friends. We only have 7 days to save billions of dollars of critical poverty-fighting programs for the most vulnerable among us.
Crossposted on the ONE Blog.
March 5th, 2008 at 12:13 am
The ONE Campaign looked quite different just a few months ago here at Baylor University. While Baylor attended the Power 100 Summit earlier this year, things did not start rolling on campus until February.
At the end of January, I organized an informational meeting for anyone interested in learning about the ONE Campaign at Baylor. We had around 25 people show up. The following meeting, we filled out our roster, created a constitution, elected officers, found two faculty sponsors, and finished the paper work to be chartered as an official organization.
In the past three weeks, ONE has evolved from an idea to a movement sweeping through Baylor’s campus. We were invited to speak in chapel on March 3 in front of 1,500 people where we had students text to join the campaign.
For the chapel, we created a video much like the one that won the weekly challenge for the OCC. In the beginning, we hoped to get a few students to speak in the video. However, our expectations were exceeded when Baylor’s president, Chaplain, Vice President of Student Life, as well as presidents from Student Government, Habitat for Humanity, and several greek organizations all wanted to be a part of the video. When all was said and done, we had adminsitration, Big 12 athletes, and even major Christian artist David Crowder in the video!
However, it did not stop there. The video will be shown on March 5 during the half time of the Baylor men’s basketball game against Texas A&M. This will allow us to promote ONE to a sold out stadium of 11,000+ people! If you get a chance, watch ESPN and keep an eye out for students wearing ONE gear in the crowd.
Finally, ONE Baylor promoted ONE Vote ‘08 and met with three presidential candidates over the past week when they were in Texas. We spoke with Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain about ONE. John McCain stopped his speech and asked the crowd and cameras to look our way. McCain publically thanked the ONE Campaign for what we are doing and asked me to inform the crowd about ONE.
I tell you all of this to encourage those of you who have not been able to get ONE going on your campus. Don’t give up and remember this is a cause greater than ourselves. We CAN make poverty history and Baylor is starting to take on the challenge.
Sic ‘Em ONE!
TAGS: Action, Top 10