In celebration of Social Justice Week, the ONE Campaign held a training session last Thursday at UW Oshkosh, sharing its 2019 agenda to end extreme poverty and encouraging students to contact lawmakers.

ONE is a global campaigning and advocacy organization co-founded by Bono of U2 in 2004, which works to end “poverty that kills.”

U.S. Regional Field Director of the ONE Campaign Shawn Phetteplace said there’s a lot of meanings to ONE, and he doesn’t know if there’s a legitimate reason for it being called that.

“But the one I like best is, ‘If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that a child shouldn’t die of a preventable disease,’” Phetteplace said.

The training, held in Reeve Union, was a two-hour session informing students about HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, preventable diseases that are leading causes of death in many third-world countries.

In 2017 globally, about one million people died from HIV/AIDS, with about 1.8 million infected; about 1.6 million died from TB, with about 10 million infected; and about 435,000 died of malaria, with about 200 million infected.

According to Phetteplace, there has been a 65% drop in extreme poverty over the last 20 years.

Director of UWO’s social justice minor program Courtney Bauder said the presentation went beyond what students learn in the classroom by encouraging them to act.

“It was valuable because we’re tempted to encourage students not only to think critically about issues but also to take actions about issues they care about,” Bauder said. “This is an opportunity for them to not just learn, but to act.”

The ONE conference concluded by offering students a template to follow when handwriting letters to Sen. Ron Johnson and Rep. Glenn Grothman, urging them to support maintaining America’s one-third commitment to the Global Fund — meaning that for every $2 other countries and private institutions donate to the Global Fund, U.S. taxpayers will donate $1.

The Global Fund is an international organization separate from the ONE Campaign that works on the ground in developing countries to provide medical supplies to those in need.

Since 2002, Wisconsin taxpayers are responsible for saving about 143,000 lives by supporting the Global Fund. These donations have provided about 89,000 HIV/AIDS patients with antiretroviral therapy, distributed over one million malaria nets and treated about 25,000 people with TB, according to ONE.

Instead of asking for monetary donations, ONE encourages people to lobby political leaders to increase spending on foreign aid.

UWO supply chain management major Sam Debauche said the event was eye-opening.

“I learned a lot of stuff I wouldn’t [have] already known,” Debauche said. “Stuff that I would say I’m comfortable backing because it was something that is helpful in the world.”

Currently, 0.6% of the U.S. federal budget goes to foreign aid, about $40 billion per year, according to Phetteplace.

Phetteplace said people have a lot more power than they think when it comes to influencing politicians.

“There’s something called the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization that we worked on a couple years back, and we were working to get the Obama Administration to add an extra billion dollars to GAVI,” Phetteplace said. “We made 5,000 phone calls to the White House switch boards and they made the decision to do so; one billion divided by 5,000 calls is about $200,000 per call.”

For more information about ONE, visit one.org.