On Thursday, Senator John McCain came to Iowa for the first time with new running mate Governor Sarah Palin.
The event was held at an air hanger in the Cedar Rapids airport and thousands of people attended, including many University of Iowa students in ONE T-shirts!
After the event, and after Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin toured parts of Cedar Rapids to see devastation from recent flooding, their motorcade pulled up to a long line of people, including ONE members, waiting for the senator and governor to board their plane.
As they walked through the line and shook hands, Senator McCain saw our ONE shirts and said that ONE is a wonderful organization and thanked us for what we do.
Next in the line came Governor Sarah Palin who shook hands with a ONE member who handed her a ONE band. She said “right on!” and immediately put on the band. (See our video). We were so happy to have represented ONE on Gov. Palin’s first visit to Iowa!
Last year, at our first event of the ONE Campus Challenge, ONE Webster stood up at “Stand Up.” This year we stood up again, but this time the entire university stood with us. Nearly a year after Missouri became a State of ONE and St. Louis became a City of ONE, Webster University became Missouri’s first Campus of ONE.
Standing with us at our ceremony last Tuesday was Dean of Students Ted Hoef, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Sarita Cargas, Student Government Association President Heather Sweeney and 15 student organizations including both the College Republicans and College Democrats. Neil George, President of the University, and David Wilson, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, were also standing, but at Webster University’s Geneva, Switzerland campus.
It was a great start to the year for ONE Webster. Attendance at the ceremony was higher than any event we have hosted before, partly a result of the barbecue that Sadie Siebert, Mike Amos and Patrick Vacek served up. As students waited in line for food, “Kritter” Kiernan and LaCreshia Griffin-Pope got them to sign the ONE Declaration and entered them into a drawing for free ONE T-shirts, bags and books. Sandra Lemenaite and Ragan Dueker ran an assembly line of school supply kits that will go to ONE Webster’s partner school in Africa. There were many more ONE Webster volunteers dropping in that afternoon to help out. One of them, Chelsi Webster made this video:
The Webster Journal was also there to cover the ceremony and wrote this article.
It was an inspiring moment watching the various student groups sign on. As future teachers, politicians and entrepreneurs they represent the various professions that are part of the solutions to extreme poverty and global diseases. In my introduction speech I told them that it doesn’t matter what they do. Do it for the right reasons. Do it to make extreme poverty history.
The Washington Post today ran an interesting article about the mounting interest in public health courses on college campuses across the country. According to the Post, “They are drawing undergraduates to lecture halls in record numbers, prompting a scramble by colleges to hire faculty and import ready-made courses.”
As you know, nearly every political and social movement in America began with college students. It’s fantastic to see such a consistent outpouring of interest and desire to learn about global poverty and global health amongst you!
A recent survey by the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that 137 of its 837 members, or 16 percent, now offer majors or minors in public health. (The number offering single courses is unknown.) Nearly two-thirds of the schools in that group require students majoring in the subject to undertake fieldwork or research.
“Today’s students want to contribute, to empower individuals and communities to take charge of their own health,” said Ruth Gaare Bernheim, who teaches health policy at the University of Virginia. “I think they also intuitively realize that the world is their community and that the gains of the 21st century will be in global public health.”
The ONE Campaign at Baylor University teamed up with Rock the Vote to encourage students to vote in the upcoming presidential election and emphasize issues facing millions of the world’s poorest people. After a one week delay due to Hurricane Ike, Baylor’s Rock the Vote concert was held on Wednesday, September 17 in one of the most heavily traveled portions of campus. Baylor ONE members tabled at the event, passed out ONE Vote ‘08 information, and encouraged students to join the campaign.
The featured musical artist Trey Duck, Shapes Stars Make, and Sleeperstar wore ONE bands as they performed their music to a crowd of Baylor students. While the concert was going on, students were encouraged to depict what voting meant to them through their artistic abilities and sign a wall with messages of the importance of voting. Overall, the night provided a great opportunity to highlight the importance of voting and the ONE Campaign to hundreds of college students.
Sic ‘Em ONE!
-Justin Kralemann, President of the ONE Campaign-Baylor
Just a reminder to all you fierce OCC-competitors out there, we are still running our Photo of the Week competition.
Each week, one student-submitted photo featuring ONE will be selected as the Photo of the Week, good for 1000 points.
In the past, pictures chosen have featured candidates in ONE gear and surrounded by ONE members, cute puppies ONE-ed out, athletic teams in support of ONE, and human ONE logos. We here at ONE certainly appreciate creativity, so grab your cameras and some ONE bands and see what you come up with!
Every week during OCC we announce a new weekly challenge to give you a chance to score big points for your school.
Our first weekly challenge of the year is to create a launch of OCC on your campus. Below are some different ideas to get your creative juices flowing. Remember to take photos, videos and to keep track of any campus press- because submissions about what you did are due on this reporting page by Sunday, September 21, at midnight PST.
Your Campus Launch can be as simple as recruiting in your dormitory, or just setting up a registration table on school grounds. You can even try to hold a rally or concert to increase OCC visibility on your campus.
You’ll score 100 points for each new sign-up. Your school can rack up 1,000 more points by having one person report on your Campus Launch by submitting photos, videos, press links, etc. at our reporting page. The school registering the most new ONE members by the end of the week (Sunday at midnight) gets 10,000 points plus a goodie-bag filled with T-shirts, wristbands, other ONE merchandise for your team and—new this year—Flip video cameras to help you record your future OCC activities!
Tabling: Set up a table in a high traffic area of campus with literature explaining ONE and its issues. Engage people as they walk by and make sure that you have plenty of sign up forms set out to help people sign up with ONE. Read more.
Speaker: Try to get a speaker on your campus to talk about topics relevant to ONE. This can be a professor who teaches a class on a similar issue, an author, a faith leader, or a politician. Make sure that you have sign-ups ready as people are entering or exiting the venue for the speaker. This is a great way to tie in the topics that the speaker touches on.
Movie screening: Movies relevant to ONE include “Nowhere in Africa” (German film); “The Girl in the Café”;” Yesterday”; “Orphans of Nkandla”; “Born into Brothels”; “Black Gold”; “Blood Diamond”; “Hotel Rwanda”; “God Grew Tired of Us”; and “Invisible Children”, among many, many others.
Storm the Dorm: Post informational fliers around a building on campus (with permission from campus administrators, of course!) Or talk with a Resident Advisor to set up a talk with residents in a particular dorm about ONE.
Campus Events: Sign up members at sporting events, concerts, outside of classrooms, anywhere on campus!
Last year, ONE presented college students with a challenge: Become the generation to make poverty history.
And they responded in a big way. More than 26,000 students from more than 1,400 schools answered the call – recruiting new members, calling their members of Congress, educating their friends, and even dressing up their college mascots in ONE gear.
Students will once again be able to score points throughout the year by taking actions. For instance, an athletic team at your school wearing ONE bands during a sporting event earns you 500 points. Writing a letter to the editor of your local paper nets 1,800 more. On top of these, each week ONE will unveil a new “weekly challenge” which gives each school a chance to earn even more points.
Then, at the end of this year’s first semester on December 3rd – ONE will fly 100 leaders from the top 100 point-earning schools to Washington, DC, from February 7 to 9 for the “Power 100 Summit.” There, these top-of-the-line ONE student leaders will hear from the premier experts in the field and dive deeper into the challenge. On March 3rd, the top 10 schools will be selected to receive $1,000 grants to create global poverty-fighting programs on their campuses. Finally, after an open vote and panel, the winning school will be announced on April 3rd, 2009.
Now the groundwork has been laid, the bar has been set, and a new academic year is upon us. That means a new round for the Campus Challenge, where any school has the chance to get all the way to the top. (There are, after all, a lot of freshmen to be recruited.)
On Saturday, the ONE Bus headed south to Waltham, MA, to Brandeis University to hold an event with students and their global poverty fighting group called Positive Foundations. Group leaders Allyson and Aka were there to welcome the ONE Bus on campus and we set up shop, explaining ONE to students and signing people up to help add voices in the fight against global disease and extreme poverty.
Hundreds of new people signed up at Brandeis, and stay tuned to the ONE blog for more events and activities with the ONE Bus. You never know what campus or political event the ONE Bus will be at next, but it is a great way to help raise the profile for ONE and the world’s poorest people!
I wanted to pass along this great article about ONE member Matthew McAllister published in the University of Colorado’s Campus Press. Matthew has been an active member of the ONE Campaign since high school and participated in last year’s ONE Campus Challenge (OCC), and we’re looking forward to him being a leader in this year’s OCC too. Matthew has also contributed to our ONE blog in the past, which you can check out here and here.
[The ONE Campaign] has since become McAllister’s passion and for the past three years he has been making changes across the nation to bring awareness to this campaign and its goals. McAllister has been a part of getting local leaders such as Gov. Bill Ritter involved with the campaign, successfully recruiting the Denver City Council to support the ONE campaign and passing a proclamation that declares CU a campus of ONE. The ONE CU student group is currently planning a signing ceremony for that proclamation to bring press attention to CU’s humanitarian values.
The ONE campus group was started by Erin Macdonald, a 21-year-old senior studying physics and mathematics. Macdonald had worked with the ONE campaign since it was created in 2005. She began the campus group in the fall of 2007, handing leadership over to McAllister in the spring of that same year.
“I think he’s one of those people that really cares about the cause,” Macdonald said. “He works hard to put together events and put the word out because he really believes in it. He’s a great leader.
All of this and McAllister hasn’t even celebrated his 20th birthday yet.
The 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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