July 21, 2005 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Charities and celebrities try to keep spotlight on antipoverty efforts after Live 8 concerts
By Suzanne Perry
Fresh from a high-profile campaign to persuade a summit of major industrialized nations to adopt measures to fight global poverty, a diverse coalition of international-relief groups, religious organizations, other charities, and celebrities is exploring ways to build on the enormous interest the effort generated.
“It’s way beyond what we’re used to,” says Didier Jacobs, special adviser to the president at Oxfam America, in Boston, a founding member of ONE: the Campaign to Make Poverty History. “It was amazing.”
The ONE campaign — created in 2004 by 11 American relief and development organizations and financed in part by a $3-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle — has attracted an eclectic mix of 43 nonprofit organizations as participants.
It has been endorsed by dozens of celebrities, including the Irish rock musician Bono and the actor Brad Pitt, as well as by evangelical Christian leaders, including Pat Robertson and Rick Warren.
Magazines and TV companies have donated space and time for advertisements featuring George Clooney, Tom Hanks, and other celebrities. Many Web sites have also donated advertising space to the campaign.
As of last week, almost 1.5 million people had signed an online declaration asking the U.S. government to allot an additional 1 percent of the federal budget to helping poor countries fight poverty and AIDS, said Seth Amgott, a spokesman for ONE and the communications director at DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa), the Washington nonprofit organization founded by Bono.
Wristband Sales
The campaign says it is asking people for their voice rather than their money. However, it has earned more than $1-million from the sale of ONE wristbands, which retail for $1 each.
The campaign has also received money from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, in Menlo Park, Calif., and a small family foundation, while the 11 founding members provide staff time and office space.
ONE is part of a global campaign that lobbied to get the Group of Eight nations, who met in Scotland this month, to adopt a package of aid, trade proposals, and debt relief to help poor countries. That campaign attracted worldwide publicity when it organized nine “Live 8″ concerts around the world just before the summit, including one in Philadelphia.
ONE sent 100 American activists to the summit, some of whom met with White House officials there. The summit leaders agreed to increase global development aid by $50-billion a year by 2010, cancel the debt of some of the poorest nations, and improve trade terms for developing countries.
While the United States did not fulfill ONE’s goal of adding 1 percent to its budget to fight global poverty, the coalition called the package a good first step.
ONE will now work to ensure that the issue of global poverty stays on the public and political agenda.
“The pledges the president made were great, but now he has to come back to work with Congress to enact them,” says Jennifer Stapleton, a spokeswoman at Bread for the World, in Washington, which is a founding member of the ONE campaign.
Coming Events
David Ray, director of constituency-building at CARE, in Atlanta, says ONE organizers are planning publicity campaigns to call attention to two more international meetings in 2005 — a United Nations meeting on antipoverty efforts, in New York in September; and a World Trade Organization meeting, in Hong Kong in December.
ONE will organize activities to put pressure on the United States to take a leadership role in New York, including mobilizing people via the Internet and holding rallies in several U.S. cities, Mr. Ray says.
A key challenge will be to translate the widespread, but sometimes superficial, support the campaign has received into effective action, Mr. Jacobs of Oxfam says.
“A lot of these people just sign a petition while attending a concert, or they saw a TV spot with Brad Pitt and went on the Web and signed,” he says. “Our challenge,” he adds, “is to keep them interested and educate them, because many of them don’t know much about developing countries.”
