| ONE Campaign | |
|---|---|
| Motto | The Campaign to Make Poverty History |
| Formation | May 16, 2004 |
| Type | Development Advocacy |
| Headquarters | Washington, D.C. |
| Location | United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, South Africa, Nigeria |
| Membership | 2.4 million |
| Official languages | English |
| Key people | Bono (co-founder, spokesperson) |
| Website | ONE.org |
The ONE Campaign is an international, nonpartisan, non-profit organization which aims to increase government funding for and effectiveness of international aid programs.
ONE was originally founded by a coalition of 11 non-profit humanitarian and advocacy organizations — including DATA, World Vision, Oxfam America, and Bread for the World — with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2007, ONE announced that it would be merging with DATA.
During the 2008 U.S. presidential election the organization launched a campaign, called ONE Vote '08, which was co-chaired by former U.S. Senate majority leaders Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Bill Frist (R-TN). The campaign is named after the song "One" by rock band U2, of which the campaign's co-founder Bono is a member.
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ONE is an organization which attempts to mobilize supporters around its issues and organize them into a lobbying force, with the goal of encouraging national leaders to fund more international development and relief programs. As a campaign to fight extreme poverty and global diseases, it supports the Millennium Development Goals.
Although its central talking points center on ending extreme poverty and fighting the AIDS pandemic, ONE supports a broad variety of international development and relief issues, including debt relief, clean water, increasing the quantity and efficiency of aid, lessening corruption in the governments of the aid-recipient countries, providing basic education for all, making trade more fair, reforming the farm bill to make it more fair for farmers in developing countries, slowing deadly diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, and increasing the international affairs budget. ONE holds the position that increasing foreign development assistance will create a more secure world, believing that global poverty and the ideological extremism that fuels terrorism are linked.
ONE was founded by 11 organizations: Bread for the World, CARE, DATA, International Medical Corps, International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps, Oxfam America, Plan USA, Save the Children U.S., World Concern, World Vision.
The official launch rally was held on May 16, 2004 at Liberty Mall in Philadelphia. About 2,000 people attended, including Bono, Dikembe Mutombo, Michael W. Smith, Richard Stearns (President of World Vision), and David Beckmann (President of Bread for the World).[1]
In December 2004, ONE announced a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.[2] Corresponding with this announcement, Mark McKinnon, an adviser to President Bush, and Mike McCurry, an adviser to the Kerry Campaign, appeared on CNN's Inside Politics with Judy Woodruff in support of ONE.[3]
On May 22, 2007 the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria announced that it had saved 1.8 million lives since 2002, including a roughly doubling of services in the past year. ONE members had advocated for the increases to the Global Fund in both 2006 and 2007.[4]
In June 2007, ONE launched ONE Vote '08.[5] to mobilize American voters to engage the presidential candidates about the issues of global diseases and poverty. ONE Vote '08 seeks to have all the candidates make the fight against global poverty a key part of their national security and foreign policy platform. ONE Vote '08 is co-chaired by former Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Bill Frist (R-TN). Since the launch, state-wide initiatives have been established in each of the four early primary states—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada.[6][7][8][9] In addition, the ONE Vote initiative has produced official and unofficial endorsements from presidential candidates John Edwards and Bill Richardson.[10][11]
In 2008, ONE merged with DATA. The two organizations are now run by CEO David Lane.[12]
The ONE Campaign is a member of the Global Coalition Against Pneumonia and supports World Pneumonia Day on November 2, 2009.
ONE uses a number of highly visible methods to reach out to the general public, promote its message, encourage action and raise funds.
Celebrity spokespeople are used to speak to the media and undertake trips abroad televised visits to areas suffering from poverty in order to illustrate the issues ONE is attempting to solve. ONE also uses its celebrity supporters for video ads which are released on YouTube.
ONE is a largely Internet-based campaign and therefore has multiple online communities throughout cyberspace. As well as using YouTube, ONE has a significant presence on MySpace, Yahoo! Groups, and Flickr,[13] and uses Facebook for its campus organizing.[14]
ONE also has field organizers around the United States to support grassroots mobilization and advocacy. The field staff works with more than 200 local ONE groups that sponsor educational events, organize community awareness events, and lobby their Members of Congress.
Supporters are encouraged to sign ONE's declaration, encourage their family, friends and community to join and lobby their political representatives.[15]
ONE has been criticized[16] for its response to a book by African economist Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way For Africa,[17] which was published in January 2009. Moyo accused ONE of mischaracterizing her views. She says that she is against only government aid, not "their kind of aid".[18] However, ONE argues that governmental development assistance "plays a critical role in the fight against extreme poverty and disease."[19] In June 2009 Dambisa Moyo told former U.S. presidential Republican speech writer Peter Robinson during a Hoover Institute sponsored Uncommon Knowledge interview that "the harshest thing that has happened [in terms of responses to her 2009 book Dead Aid], Bono's and Bob Geldof's organization, called One, who I had tried to have a number of meetings with before the book came out, about what the theses of the book were, launched a very vitriolic attack against me. To the point that they were calling organizations ahead of my meetings and media appointments and sent a letter to African NGO's claiming, basically, painting me as a genocidal maniac trying to kill African babies. In other words, trying to get Africans to be against me. To me, that was not really fostering dialogue."[20]
In September 2010, it was reported that the foundation used only 1.2% of their donations for charitable causes, and that the majority went on salaries.[21] Though, to be fair, as the article points out, the organization is a campaign and advocacy organization that has never claimed to be sustaining efforts on the ground in Africa with any monetary contributions. The organization is very clear to all of its members that "we are not asking for your money, we are only asking for your voice." The monies received go towards funding their campaigns to advocate government support and public funds for "smart aid" programs fighting extreme poverty and preventable diseases.