The ONE Campus Challenge is a college competition designed to mobilize students, faculty and alumni in the fight against extreme poverty and preventable disease.
It’s no secret: college students are a powerful political force. So in 2007, ONE launched the ONE Campus Challenge to propel this group into action.
The ONE Campus Challenge (OCC) is an intercollegiate competition designed to mobilize students in the fight against extreme poverty and preventable disease. Through life-saving actions, creative challenges and educational events, college students, professors, alumni and friends join together and urge political leaders to support smart and effective programs that save lives and improve futures for generations to come.
ONE Campus achieves change through advocacy. Last year alone, ONE Campus recruited and educated more than 10,000 advocates, met with Members of Congress more than 300 times, sent more than 3,000 letters, made over 1,500 phone calls, and took 20,000 other poverty fighting actions. And the numbers just keep growing.
Meet the ONE Campus Team
Meet the team responsible for planning and implementing the ONE Campus program. Got questions? Feel free to contact us here!
Meredith Horowski is responsible for OCC program coordination, the annual ONE Power Summit, member recruitment and student leadership structure. Meredith graduated from the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, with a focus on human rights and international development and a minor in Spanish. She first joined ONE in 2009 as part of the University of Michigan’s ONE Chapter, where she helped engage students and community members with creative advocacy and education campaigns. Prior to joining ONE full time, Meredith worked as a research assistant at the National Poverty Center and also spent a semester in Argentina, studying and volunteering with community development projects.
Matt Higginson leads ONE efforts to organize colleges students and young people across the nation. He joined ONE in March 2007 to manage the ONE Vote '08 project in Nevada. Prior to that, he worked on a variety of local and statewide campaigns and elections in NV. Matt graduated from Brigham Young University in 2004, with a degree in international relations that emphasized Middle Eastern and Chinese studies, including Arabic and Mandarin language studies. Prior to moving back to his home town of Las Vegas, Matt worked in the U.S. Senate for Senator Harry Reid.
Check out past winners of the ONE Campus Challenge below.
2012: Univ. of Florida and Univ. of Washington, Seattle
The University of Florida and University of Washington, Seattle took the top spots for parts I and II of Season 5 of the ONE Campus Challenge. They joined our second and third place winners from both semesters at the legendary Bonnaroo Music Festival in Tennessee for four action packed days of ONE recruiting and awesome musical performances. University of Washington secured the winning spot with over 100 photo petitions to President Obama, 200 phones collected for health care workers in Kenya, and a creative, educational PSA to world leaders urging them to support smart development programs. University of Florida took the lead for Part 1 with their impressively poignant Tumblr blog highlighting their experience living on $1.50/day and hundreds of letters and phone calls to Congress and the Obama Administration.
The University of Michigan won OCC for a second year in a row, winning a trip to DC for their top students and a quick meeting with Bono in Philadelphia to share their successful campaign efforts. Throughout the year, they gathered 885 letters, 116 phone calls, and 150 petition signatures, and successfully rallied more than 1,150 voices in the fight against global hunger. They also creatively distributed 1,000 custom ONE coffee sleeves, held an impressive educational dinner and hosted a karaoke night.
The University of Michigan took the top spot in 2010, focusing much of the season on issues of maternal and child health. In addition to a petition shaped like a giant Africa map, the chapter successfully logged 78 calls to Congress, 78 handwritten letters to Michigan Senators Levin and Stabenow, and an astounding 789 letters to Congress. For the grand prize, ONE at UMich received $10,000 to donate to the ONE partner organization of their choice. They promptly decided on Carolina for Kibera, a small nonprofit in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya - the largest slum in East Africa.
ONE is a grassroots advocacy and campaigning organization that fights extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa, by raising public awareness and pressuring political leaders to support smart and effective policies and programs that are saving lives, helping to put kids in school and improving futures. Cofounded by Bono and other campaigners, ONE is nonpartisan and works closely with African activists and policy makers
