The 2007-8 Season

The ONE Campus Challenge (OCC) launched in September 2007. Throughout the year, more than 26,000 students at more than 1,400 colleges and universities signed up to raise awareness and take action against global poverty on their campuses.

Students scored points for their schools by taking actions including writing and calling their members of Congress on poverty-fighting legislation, raising awareness of ONE's issues through panels, speeches and exciting visual displays on their campuses, and recruiting thousands more members to ONE.

In January, a passionate, innovated group of leaders from the 100 schools with the most points were invited to DC for the Power 100 Summit, where they gained invaluable information that was both inspiring and also made the ultimate challenge of making poverty history seem much more tangible. The students heard from well-known leaders and influencers from both political parties and the anti-poverty movement, including Paul Begala, Gene Sperling, Steve Radlet and Bill Frist, and left with new organizing techniques, understanding, responsibility, and inspiration.

In March, the top 10 schools were awarded $1,000 grants to implement the best poverty-fighting program on their campuses.

While Brandeis, Campbellsville, Hofstra, GWU, Kansas State, Princeton, Sacred Heart, UNLV, and Wilmington all produced some amazing projects, in the end Western Kentucky University beat them all, at one point signing up more than 1,700 new members in just one day, writing scores of letters to their members of Congress through the year, getting WKU declared a ONE Campus and their town Bowling Green, KY, declared a ONE City.

The 2008-9 Season

Kicking off in September, the 2008-9 ONE Campus Challenge included more than 2,400 different colleges and universities across the nation, all competing through weekly challenges, advocacy initiatives, and awareness-raising activities. In total, more than 45,000 actions were taken over the course of the year by OCC members to advance the fight against global poverty.

After 10 exciting weekly challenges, in December we tallied up the points and narrowed the competition down to the top 100 schools in the country. These schools sent representatives to the Power 100 Summit: three days of training, education, inspiration and fun in February.

The summit featured VIP speakers, including:

Sally Canfield, Senior Program Officer, Global Health Division of The Gates Foundation
Jim Kolbe, Senior Transatlantic Fellow, German Marshall Fund of the United States
Jonathan Martin, Senior Political Writer, Politico
Amy Walter, Editor-in-Chief, Hotline
Charlie Hurt, Washington Bureau Chief, New York Post
Lauren Bush and Ellen Gustafson, The FEED Project
Fred Ochieng, Milton Ochieng and Caitlin Reiner, Lwala Community Alliance
Peter Pham, Director of the Nelson Institute for International & Public Affairs, James Madison University
Steve Morrison, Senior Vice President, Center for Strategic & International Studies
Sadia Hameed, Organizer for Extractive Industries, OXFAM International
Ambassador Mark Green, Former Ambassador to Tanzania; Director of the Policy Center at Malaria No More
Gawain Kripke, OXFAM
Patrick Schmitt, STAND
Michael Gerson, Council on Foreign Relations
Toby Tanser, Shoe4Africa

The Summit also included workshops with ONE staff on topics such as the Obama Administration, New Media, and student organizing; and the first-ever "Lobby Day" where students met with members of Congress to discuss legislative solutions to global poverty.

In March, we announced the Top 10 schools, each of which received a $1,000 grant towards creating an on-campus anti-poverty project. The Top 10 schools (in order of total points):

1. Wright State University, Dayton, OH
2. Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, CT
3. Baylor University, Waco, TX
4. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
5. University of California - Davis, Davis, CA
6. Webster University, St. Louis, MO
7. Curry College, Milton, MA
8. University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI
9. Wofford College, Spartanburg, SC
10. University of Florida, Gainesville, FL

The amazing final projects these schools submitted were evaluated by a combination of scores from a ONE staff judging panel and online votes, and Wofford College emerged victorious as the 2008-9 OCC champions.

Wofford's project, titled "ONE Week to Change the World," included teaching about ONE's issues in 29 classes across 10+ majors, a rally and trivia night, an art contest, a film screening, outreach to sports teams, an interfaith ONE Sabbath, a panel discussion on trade and microcredit, partnerships with several other campus groups, fundraising for three charities and advocacy work on two different pieces of legislation. ONE-Wofford employed every available resource, turned their small student body size into an advantage, had both breadth and depth to their events, and created partnerships and momentum that will keep ONE's message alive at Wofford long after the current students have graduated.