Readers, I’ve got a bit of sad news: We’re closing down the blog for the holidays. But don’t worry: we’ll be back in the new year bigger and better than ever. As your trusty ONE Blog editor, I promise there will be lots of educational and inspirational content from our ONE members, partners and staffers in 2012.
If you find yourself longing for our daily anti-poverty updates (which I’m sure you will), there are a number of things you can do to keep the ONE Blog in your heart.
Make a holiday-inspired panel on our (2015)QUILT. There’s no limit to how many times you can make a panel, so go crazy. Make one for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, you name it. Here’s my Christmas-themed one. Isn’t it cute?
Participate in ONE Act a Week and submit your anti-poverty-related New Year’s resolution. Mine is to volunteer locally at least once a month. What will yours be?
Catch up on ONE’s highlights of the year and read our 2011 Highlights series. We discuss all the results of each of our major projects, including ONE Campus Challenge, Faith at ONE and our vaccines, HIV/AIDS and budget campaigns.
Lastly, I’d love to hear from you. What do you like about the ONE Blog? How would you make it different? What kind of blog posts do you want to see more of? Tell me in the comments below. I promise that I’ll directly respond to any of your questions if you have them. And for goodness’ sake, let me know if you’d like to write for us. We publish pieces from our ONE members all the time!
Each day this week, we’ll highlight a major accomplishment in the fight against poverty that ONE members helped achieve in 2011. Today, ONE’s US Deputy Director for New Media Garth Moore discusses our World AIDS Day campaign.
Last summer, new scientific studies pointed to a tantalizing possibility: The Beginning of the End of AIDS. What could that have meant? A horrible disease that has taken millions of lives could be on the downhill thanks to advancements and lower costs for treatment and prevention. Suddenly, villages and communities where AIDS was once a death sentence could be kept healthy and avoid getting HIV in the first place through stopping mother-to-child transmission and more preventive methods. When ONE, (RED) and other partners combined forces to push US leaders to scale up treatment and prevention, we recognized this wasn’t a pipe dream, but a serious call to action.
Each day this week, we’ll highlight a major accomplishment in the fight against poverty that ONE members helped achieve in 2011. Today, ONE’s OCC coordinator Mike Fazzino discusses our ONE Campus Challenge.
For our fifth year of the ONE Campus Challenge, students around the nation didn’t disappoint. More than 700 colleges participated in the challenge, and its ONE members put their powerful voices to work. Through creative challenges, college students, professors, alumni and friends joined together and urged political leaders to support smart and effective programs that save lives. So what did we accomplish?
Please welcome Kelsey Finnegan to the ONE Blog. She is the winner of our ONE Act a Week blog post contest on advocacy and the holidays. In this piece, she writes about her perception of Africa before and after her time in Ghana.
Sometimes I wonder what life would’ve been like if I’d never gone to Africa. I would have probably existed in a world that was simpler, where my thoughts didn’t reach beyond the boundaries of my university, where things were the way they were just because that was the way things were. We have all seen the sad ads with fly-bitten children’s faces flickering across the television screen. In those portrayals of Africa, it made the continent seem like a dark and curiously lost place, hopeless and wild.
I began my work in Africa at 19, as a volunteer teacher for two months in Ghana. I came across Happy Kids Orphanage, a beautiful but struggling place where the children slept on urine-covered cement floors and never experienced the luxury of a full meal. I saw it as a place that could be receptive to change, and in the years since, we’ve been able to build a dormitory, two classrooms and start a nutritional food program. In my favorite project, I partnered with a fair-trade company, Della, to start the Happy Kids Sewing Program.
Paloma Pineda and Katherine Warren, founding co-directors of the Akili Initative, an online student think tank for global health, report on the recent Consortium of Universities for Global Health.
The immense challenges of global health have increasingly inspired our younger generation to act to create change. As global health challenges grow, students’ optimistic spirit, capacity to innovate and multidisciplinary perspectives will be an invaluable resource to cultivate in the years to come.
Over the past few decades, universities have recognized this value and have made strides towards providing students with the tools they need to make an impact in global health work. Currently, more than 240 North American universities have dedicated global health coursework, and more than a third of those also include research programs. The Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) seeks to build collaboration among these institutions to ensure optimal curricula and research programs.
Jonathan Morgenstein, a Marine Corps Reserves captain and fellow at the Truman National Security Project, urges Americans to stand by international development for the sake of national security.
During my 20 years in the Marine Corps reserves, including two tours in Iraq and one in Bosnia, I learned deep lessons about the awesome capabilities — and realistic limits — of American military power.
A strong military is key to American security, but military alone cannot solve all of our challenges. America needs stable friends and allies worldwide able to help us prevent and eliminate these threats.
Study: Christianity grows exponentially in Africa - With 2.18 billion adherents, Christianity has become a truly global religion over the past century as rapid growth in developing nations offset declines in Christianity’s traditional strongholds, according to a report released Monday. Crowds gather at the traditional Christmas Market of Frankfurt, Germany. A new study finds there are now more Protestants in Nigeria than in Germany where Protestantism began. (G. Jeffrey MacDonald, Religion News Service)
NFL Players Association and NFL Team up with USAID and Ad Council to Tackle the Crisis in the Horn of Africa – Just in time for the holiday season, a time when charitable giving increases, NFL players have joined FWD, a national public awareness campaign designed to inform Americans of the extreme famine, war and drought in the Horn of Africa. Developed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Ad Council, the FWD campaign encourages Americans to forward the facts about the crisis and to donate to the relief efforts. (Ad Council Press Release)
ONE is campaigning to ensure that the Congressional budget does not cut foreign assistance programs like Feed the Future that help people break the cycle of poverty and hunger.
The Horn of Africa is experiencing its worst drought in 60 years. More than 11 million people, mostly nomadic pastoralists and farmers in south-central Somalia, north-eastern Kenya, and south-eastern Ethiopia, are severely lacking access to food.
2011 marks 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were documented. Take a closer look at the specific, achievable goals we must hit by 2015 to make this year the beginning of the end of AIDS.
As aid agencies warn more than 9 million people could be affected by a food crisis in East Africa, world leaders are failing to keep their 2009 promises to tackle the causes of chronic hunger and support farmers in the world's poorest countries.
