ONE co-founder Jamie Drummond with teenagers born in 2000, the year the Millennium Development Goals were set, at Malinzanga Primary School, Tanzania.
Hello ONErs – Hooray! We made it! – It’s ONE-ONE day!
The reason we set up ONE a decade ago was to help make sure some wishes – like those we humans make at this time of year – aren’t just forgotten in a vague haze of aspiration, but get done and delivered: that promises made get kept. That’s the world everyone wants to live in, right?
So to celebrate ONE-ONE day with all you lovely world-changing ONE members, I’ve got a bunch of New Year wishes I’m going to embarrass myself by sharing – and a cast iron commitment I am making to this community.
For me: well, I want to lose a few pounds, get back on the bike , cut back on the booze (especially after last night), get back into windsurfing and poetry, take up a spot of carpentry and build a cottage overlooking the ocean by some hills out in The West. Not much then. In a year’s time I promise to let you know how I’m doing.
Far more more importantly though…
All of us at ONE are determined to make this year historic, and to fight to ensure that when world leaders meet – which they do many times this year – they will agree on great, inspiring goals that commit everyone to help everyone else on this planet, through a global pact of mutually assured devotion.
If this sounds a bit over the top to you, here’s the amazing fact: world leaders are considering committing us all to a global pact for compassion and justice, this very year, embodied in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These would commit us to the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger and the preventable deaths of kids and mothers – in 15 years time – by 2030.
If we achieve this it would give everyone everywhere a shot at a decent, dignified life, enriched with the kind of opportunities I just shared (windsurfing, carpentry and cottage building rather than worrying about whether I’ve enough food to eat, medicines for my family, a decent job).
But this great vision may not come to life. And that’s where you come in. We want every ONE member this year to campaign to persuade world leaders to agree to these goals, put the empowerment of women and girls at their heart (without that they are meaningless) and make sure everyone in the whole world knows about these goals and holds world leaders and each of us accountable for delivering them.
How are we going to bring this to life? We would love your ideas.
Personally, I’m going to find 15 items from around my apartment that are personal to me, which represent the 15 things I want these new goals to dramatically improve by 2015, (such as beating HIV/Aids, malaria, Ebola and getting all girls in school) and put them in a chest which I’m burying somewhere symbolic and personal to me and my family. I hope to dig these up with my family in 15 years time, and we will discuss how well humanity did.
Every year between now and then, so long as I’m alive, I’ll write to all ONE members and anyone else who is interested on how the world is doing, until the job is done. For everyone.