ONE Dream Realized

It was three years ago that I first heard about the ONE Campaign and decided to hop onboard our generation's movement to wipe out poverty from our futures. Since then I've learned a lot. I've had successes as well as failures. I've met some really cool people trying to save the world and I've had an amazing time in the process.

Yet for the past two years, volunteering in high school and in a rural community in Mid-Missouri was not easy. No one seemed to want to acknowledge the fact that a child dies every three seconds simply because they're too poor to live and it was nearly impossible trying to find some fellow concerned citizens to step up to the challenge.

But this last year all of that has changed. I have met and befriended some of the most amazing people on this planet who have demonstrated their commitment and ability to making a better safer world for all of us.

This commitment was proven this past weekend when I was absent from most of WKU's ONE Community Outreach program and yet all my best friends and fellow world-changers from here in the Commonwealth stepped up their game to get the word out to the community about fighting global poverty and disease. The result was WKU winning this week's challenge as well as recruiting more members to ONE this week than any other campus in the nation, for the second week in a row!!!!

This awesomeness raised WKU up to 4th place in the nation, beating out Princeton and George Washington!

But more importantly, this weekend proved to me not only that I now have some of the most amazing friends anyONE could ever ask for, but more importantly this weekend gave me hope. Hope that ONE day a child will no longer die simply due to a mosquito bite. Hope that ONE day we will MAKE POVERTY HISTORY...

Thanks to all my amazing friends who did EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE this weekend and to all the rest of you who are reading this now, if you haven't already done so, join ONE at one.org/campus and get onboard our generations movement to bring justice to the voiceless all across the world.

As ONE,
Matt Vaughan