The Beginning

Here's the thing, I've never blogged before, so this is kind of awkward for me. This is my advanced appology if it should read that way.

Here's the story in a nutshell: I replied to an email sent by the ONE student outreach coordinator about bringing the ONE Campaign to the University of Missouri's campus. She then gave me the email address of another girl from Mizzou who also replied to that email. Her name is Jane Silcock. Jane and I exchanged emails, and then met to talk about business. Once we figured everything out we set up a meeting with the ORG VP of Administrations.

After meeting with her, we had to sit down and write a Constitution. We had requirements that needed to be met by both the University and ONE. After combining the two, a Constitution was born. The next step was to have a meeting. I had already created a facebook group, and there were over 100 members, so I thought this would be easy. Just send a message to everyone, and they'll come running. Wrong. There were a total of eight people at our meeting. All of them were my friends. Talk about disappointment. We needed to elect a board within the month and eight people show up, mostly because I ragged on them to. Granted, we weren't allowed to hang up signs and posters around campus yet because we were not reckognized by the University yet. But nonetheless, I was disappointed. (ps, thanks for showing up guys!)

Anyway, the next day I get this facebook message from a guy at Webster. He tells me he founded the ONE Campaign up there and asks me if I've been in touch with a teacher who has been on the ONE Blog and works in Columbia. I look up the teacher. Matt Cone is his name, and this guy is incredible. His students spoke so highly of him in these articles, I had to meet him. I wanted him involved in our Campaign. So I got his email, shot him a line, and hoped for the best. And oh yeah, did I mention this guy from Webster's best friend goes to Mizzou and wants to get involved with our Campaign? Things were looking up.

I get an email back from Cone the next day. He is real busy and wants me to call him. Awkward. But I did. I told him what was going on with our Campaign so far and he is real excited. He tells me his students are doing a big project on AIDS in Africa and he is inviting people from the community to come and hear what they have to say and engage in a discussion afterwards, and he wants me to go. I did. It was amazing. Those kids know so much about the problems and why they happen and what it is going to take to stop it. People need to listen to our youth more often.

So that happened and then ONE launched the Campus Challenge. Talk about motivation. The first day we were top 20, then we dropped to 78. Then I got my ass on facebook, wrote down all of my friend's email addresses that went to Mizzou. Sent them all invites to sign-up. Now we are #12. And we are still pending to become official on campus. Things are looking up. ONE is going to be huge at Mizzou. In Columbia.

I dedicated this past weekend to ONE Mizzou. I am completely obsessed because I know if this gets big enough, we can change things. We will change things. We have the resources, and we're not going to let them go to waste. I won't let them. There is too much at stake.

If you're reading this and you haven't signed on to the ONE Campus Challenge, you should. You better after reading this. Here is the site.
http://www.one.org/campus/mycampus.html?id=-3312080-tX.Lju&school_id=2160

Follow our story. It's going to be a good one.