You’ll have to submit an action to get your 100 points, of course.

On our page, we’ve got all the latest news and info, photos from the book drive so far, a discussion board where you can post questions and comments, some cool videos, and more. And this is where we’ll be posting important updates about deadlines, legislation, partner activities and other stuff you need to know.

But mostly, we want this page to be about you — the students. So please, post on the wall and engage on the discussion board whenever you have something to share. Update us on your activities, post links to your press coverage, share your photos or vent your concerns. It’s up to you!

We have to allow the Liberian Literacy Foundation enough time to pick up your books and count them to verify your totals, so they’ll do that between November 20 and 30. If all goes well, we’ll be able to announce the winner on December 1 — just a couple of days before we announce the top 100 schools we’ll be inviting to send representatives to our Power 100 Summit in January.

Just a reminder, the prizes for winning the November challenge are:

1. 50,000 OCC points
2. Copies of Half the Sky, signed by author Sheryl WuDunn, for your team
3. New, customizable OCC T-shirts for your team, with your choice of color print
4. A ONE press release about your big win sent to your local and campus publications
5. A visit to your campus by Liberian Literacy Foundation Executive Director E. Victor Helb, Jr., and a conference call with Dr. Joseph Korto, the Liberian Minister of Education in December.

We’ll also have runner-up prizes of 25,000 and 12,500 points for the second- and third-place schools.

All of us here at ONE are floored by the incredible totals coming in from the book drive so far. We have more than 8,000 books registered now, and the promise of several thousand more before the deadline.

I’ll be honest with you, Maisie and I would have been happy if we’d gotten 500 books total. You all have surpassed our wildest expectations, and our friends at the Liberian Literacy Foundation are literally moved to tears by your efforts for this great cause.

No matter who wins this challenge, everyone who donates a single book should be very proud of the difference you’re making in Liberia.

Former Tennessee senator and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist will give a talk Tuesday, Dec. 1, at Vanderbilt University to mark World AIDS Day.

Frist’s talk, “Celebrating Life, Mourning Death: Continuing the Fight Against Global AIDS,” begins at 7:30 p.m. in the ballroom of the Student Life Center located at 310 25th Ave. S. A 6:30 p.m. reception precedes the event.

Tickets are free and open to the Vanderbilt community only. Tickets are available now at the Sarratt Student Center box office.

A nationally renowned heart and lung transplant surgeon, Frist co-chairs the Save the Children organization’s “Survive to 5” campaign to save the lives of children under the age of five. His nonprofit organization, Hope Through Healing Hands, promotes improved quality of life for individuals and communities around the world through the idea that health care can be a currency for peace.

He also co-chaired ONE Vote ‘08, an unprecedented, non-partisan campaign to make global health and extreme poverty foreign policy priorities in the 2008 presidential election.

Frist is currently an assistant professor of cardiac surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He annually leads medical mission trips to Africa.

The event is sponsored by The Commons, East House, Office of the Dean of Students, Office of Active Citizenship and Service, ONE, VandyCares, The Red Cross at Vanderbilt, Global Health Council and Vanderbilt Student Government’s Arts & Science Council Association.

Read the full article with contact info here. Can’t wait to see what other schools pull off for World AIDS Day!

Brandeis and Boston University both participated in a huge city-wide Stand Up event last month, organized by the Millennium Campus Network. At the event on Oct. 16, BU & Brandeis submitted hundreds of postcards to Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, thanking him for his leading role with S. 1524: the Foreign Assistance Revitalization Act. They also asked Sen. Kerry to keep poverty reduction that assists in the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals as a focus of US foreign assistance during bill markups.

These Boston schools took some initiative with their participation in Boston’s Stand Up event – but you can do it, too! …In a couple different ways!

-Handwritten letters to your senators thanking him or her for signing a bill or asking to cosponsor a piece of legislation get noticed. And the more handwritten letters from constituents that ask the same thing of a Senator? Well, those really get noticed, trust us. Check out some tips of the trade from ONE staff on letter writing at http://www.one.org/c/us/about/844/.

Admittedly, handwritten letters can be a bit time-consuming, and probably will not be responded to well if you’re tabling on campus when people have places to be, so:

-Don’t forget about the OCC petition tabling tool! In addition to being convenient, an online petition serves your school’s recruitment efforts and helps build your base so you can take more actions and make more of an impact in the future. Check out the online petition tabling tool for S.1524, and if you’re tabling this week, you can use our new petition on the International Affairs Budget to table and collect sign ups.

ONE Members are still encouraging senators to sign on to S. 1524 – this is great forum for a letter-writing party with your group or for tabling on-campus. Senators take note, and either way, your campus gets a TON of points – what’s not to like?

Got any plans for the spring semester? ONE’s New Media team is looking for a spring intern.

This is an awesome opportunity to learn the ropes of the organization, and work with the team that runs this website — we develop online campaigns, coordinate and filter content for the ONE and OCC Blogs, handle all ONE’s photo and video assets (cool stuff), and we get to play on Facebook and Twitter a lot.

Oh, and you get to sit right next to me in ONE’s DC office! What could be better than that???

Here’s the official ad — feel free to post and share with anyone you know who might be looking for a spring internship:

ONE is currently recruiting an intern for the New Media Team. As an intern with the online team, your responsibilities will include (but not be limited to):

• Assist in all areas of online communication, including, but not limited to: blog posts, Twitter updates, and Facebook and MySpace communications.
• Perform research related to ONE’s online program, both looking at internal metrics and best practices from other sources.
• Work directly with team members on special projects that may arise.
• Assist in photography, design and coding projects as skills allow.

Skills Required:

• Strong organization skills; proven ability to multi-task
• Superb written and spoken communications skills
• Self-starter who can work independently
• Strong sense of teamwork and collaboration
• Ability to think critically and independently
• General interest and dedication to the mission of ONE

Qualifications: To be eligible for an internship at ONE, candidates must be undergraduate level students with a minimum of sophomore status or recent graduates within 6 months of completing their undergraduate degree. ONE’s internship program does not currently accommodate graduate level students.

Interested? Email your resume, cover letter, a couple references and this brief questionaire to interns@one.org.I don’t make the final hiring decision, but I’ll be happy to give my recommendation to any OCC student who applies!

Learn more about internships at ONE here. The deadline to apply is Monday, November 23. Good luck.

Go ahead and vote, here.

The Baylor Bears are at it again! Check out this great article from Baylor’s news website:

Baylor University students will build awareness of poverty issues around the Waco community with the Poverty Summit held Nov. 6 – 8 in the Bill Daniel Student Center on Baylor’s campus.

The summit will present keynote speaker David Johnson, CEO of Silent Images and a former English teacher, who takes his camera around the world to document stories of hope in the midst of poverty. There also will be a panel discussion with community members, students, faculty and staff, as well as 12 interdisciplinary breakout sessions about medicine, economics, missions, politics and ethics in poverty.

“The Poverty Summit aims to engage students in meaningful dialogue about the issues surrounding poverty. We hope that students, faculty and staff will be inspired to act and work for change in our community,” said Marianne Magjuka, coordinator of service learning initiatives at Baylor, who helped develop the idea of the summit.

Registration begins at 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 6, followed by an exhibition of programs including Steppin’ Out, ONE Campaign, TOMS and the Texas Hunger Initiative designed to raise awareness and alleviate poverty. A silent auction of David Johnson prints will be held on the third floor rotunda of the student center.

The summit includes the World Hunger Banquet at 6 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 7 and the screening of The Price of Sugar, followed by discussion at Common Grounds at 9 p.m.

To close the summit, participants will serve food to the homeless at the Church Under the Bridge at 10:15 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 8.

For more info and to register to attend, click here.

Seton Hall ONE Members Katie M and Daria took a break to take advantage of this photo op while they were packing up books for the November Bookdrive.

The OCC Team loved their 7-ft tall stack of books, not to mention how much fun they had collecting them all.

Thanks again to Seton Hall students and to everyone who has already donated books towards the challenge this month. Emily and I have been totally floored by the response this month and we know that the Liberian Literacy Foundation will be thrilled, too. Stay tuned to find out the winner of the closely-contested November Bookdrive.

What’s it about? We’re asking members of Congress to sign on to a letter in the House of Representatives that will go to President Obama before the Thanksgiving holiday. This letter is the first step in a year-long budget and appropriations process that ultimately results in the International Affairs Budget – which funds the U.S. State Department and its diplomatic efforts to keep America safe and build allies, as well as USAID and our contributions to important organizations including UNICEF, the World Bank, the Global Fund, PEPFAR, GAAVI, and more.

So we need the President’s requested amount to be a high as possible to support and expand critical programs to improve basic education, child survival and maternal health, debt relief, agricultural development, and many others.

Fortunately, our champions in Congress have put together letters to the President to let him know they’re in favor of a robust International Affairs Budget, thus encouraging him to start us off with strong amount requests in January. So we want as many members of Congress as possible to sign on to the Berman-Kirk letter in the House of Representatives, as well as its companion, the Kerry-Lugar-Feinstein letter in the Senate.

Now here’s your part. Your member of Congress in the House of Representatives needs to know the International Affairs Budget is important to you, or else he or she might not sign on to the Berman-Kirk letter requesting a robust International Affairs Budget.

Tell your representative to sign the letter now.

And if you want to do more (and earn lots more OCC points for your efforts), check out the advocacy kit put together by our partners at the US Global Leadership Coalition. You’ll find all the info you need for making phone calls to both representatives and senators about the letters. You can report your calls here for 1,000 points per call.

Our target is 170 letter signers in the House of Representatives and 60 in the Senate. We’ll deliver your messages right before the November 25 deadline for members of Congress to sign on to the letter. So you have just seven days to help us create a movement around the 2011 International Affairs Budget — starting…NOW!

-Emily Stivers

At the Student Conference on US Affairs (SCUSA) such a scenario played out, and the result was a policy paper on “The Challenges and Opportunities for the African Continent.” The unique experiences that converged as we discussed our US Policy towards the African Continent were incredible to experience, and the mutual learning for all of us present was incredible.

From future policy wonks, a writer, a Feminist, military cadets, and hopeful business leaders going back to Africa after college, we managed to both teach and learn from each other. In the end we created a policy that we, the engaged youth entering leadership roles to alter the way we all interact and build a better world, could say we were proud of.

Part of our proposal includes reforming our Foreign Assistance, an issue I brought to the table as a part of my work on the issue with ONE and Americans for Informed Democracy on my campus and in my congressional district.

The policy proposal will be going to AFRICOM, the US Military’s African Command, once the final touches are put on, proving that our voices are already important in helping shape the world around us.

-Charlie Harris, Campus Outreach Ambassador for Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia