Spring Break
Record number of Student Stand in a campaign to end poverty
by Ariel Wittenberg
News | 10/23/07
Posted online at 9:46 PM EST on 10/22/07
/ Last updated at 3:52 AM EST on 10/22/07
More than 38.7 million people around the globe stood up against poverty last Wednesday. Literally.
About 30 Brandeisians joined 200 Boston-area students in a protest at Boston University to fight poverty and to join an international effort to break the record for the number of people standing at one time in the Guiness Book of World Records. The previous record was 23.5 million people standing.
The record was broken as part of the "Stand Up, Speak Out" campaign against poverty, organized by the United Nations Millenium Campaign and the Global Call to Action against Poverty. These are worldwide organizations committed to eradicating extreme poverty by the year 2015, one of the Millennium Development Goals the United Nations set in 2000.
The protest launched the new Boston Millennium Campus Network, whose member schools include Brandeis, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University and Boston College.
Seth Werfel '10, one of the executive directors of Positive Foundations, Brandeis' organization affiliated with the initiative, said the group's goal is to end poverty.
"We wanted to make sure that everyone realizes that we're all in this together," Werfel said. "We wanted to bring Boston-area schools together and to meet each other."
Positive Foundations raised nearly $4,000 last academic year to support the Millennium Promise, a nongovernmental organization that finances U.N. efforts to eliminate extreme poverty-the term used for people who subsist on less than one dollar per day-through the establishment of Millennium Villages.
In order to gain both support and attention, the launch was full of both information and entertainment.
Abel Mote (GRAD), a student at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management and a native of Kenya, spoke about aid work he has done in Somalia and the horrors of the poverty he encountered there.
"You know, poverty, it has a certain look, and it has a certain smell that confronts you," Mote said. "And people, even poor people, want to live with some sort of dignity, and the worst part about poverty is that it doesn't even let them do that."
About 30 Brandeisians joined 200 Boston-area students in a protest at Boston University to fight poverty and to join an international effort to break the record for the number of people standing at one time in the Guiness Book of World Records. The previous record was 23.5 million people standing.
The record was broken as part of the "Stand Up, Speak Out" campaign against poverty, organized by the United Nations Millenium Campaign and the Global Call to Action against Poverty. These are worldwide organizations committed to eradicating extreme poverty by the year 2015, one of the Millennium Development Goals the United Nations set in 2000.
The protest launched the new Boston Millennium Campus Network, whose member schools include Brandeis, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University and Boston College.
Seth Werfel '10, one of the executive directors of Positive Foundations, Brandeis' organization affiliated with the initiative, said the group's goal is to end poverty.
"We wanted to make sure that everyone realizes that we're all in this together," Werfel said. "We wanted to bring Boston-area schools together and to meet each other."
Positive Foundations raised nearly $4,000 last academic year to support the Millennium Promise, a nongovernmental organization that finances U.N. efforts to eliminate extreme poverty-the term used for people who subsist on less than one dollar per day-through the establishment of Millennium Villages.
In order to gain both support and attention, the launch was full of both information and entertainment.
Abel Mote (GRAD), a student at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management and a native of Kenya, spoke about aid work he has done in Somalia and the horrors of the poverty he encountered there.
"You know, poverty, it has a certain look, and it has a certain smell that confronts you," Mote said. "And people, even poor people, want to live with some sort of dignity, and the worst part about poverty is that it doesn't even let them do that."
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