The student activist group Positive Foundations will conclude its week-long campaign to promote awareness about poverty, disease and education in third-world nations today with a community dinner and a request to legislators. The club has raised over $600 during the campaign-and over $3,000 this academic year-to promote the Millennium Promise, a non-governmental organization that finances United Nations 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.

The club at Brandeis raises money primarily to sponsor a Millennium Village in sub-Saharan Africa.

The group will also host a "Call to Action" today, during which students will call their Congressional representatives and ask them to step up efforts to combat extreme poverty.

"Brandeis is at the cutting edge of the movement to fight extreme poverty," said Seth Werfel '10, one of the club's directors.

Sam Vaghar '08, another director, described the campaign as only the beginning of the fight against poverty and "proof that this campus cares about the Millennium Development Goals."

The campaign began Wednesday with a lecture on theories of development delivered by the director of the United Nations Hunger Project and a coffeehouse to raise money for the Millennium Development Goals. A lecture on the history of African nations with members of the Brandeis anthropology department followed on Thursday, and Eric Kashambuzi, Ph.D., a policy adviser for the Millennium Project, and two Heller School professors delivered a lecture Friday on improving the overall quality of life in developing nations.

The group also hosted a video conference with Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and a former director of the United Nations Millennium Project, which oversees pursuit of the Millennium Development Goals. A community dinner at 5 p.m. Tuesday in the Shaprio Campus Center Multipurpose Room will mark the end of the campaign.

In his lecture Friday, Kashambuzi discussed the importance of integrating all the different elements of improving life in regions of extreme poverty, which was the basis of the passage of the U.N. Millennium Declaration in 2000.

"Every country must have a comprehensive poverty reduction strategy," said Kashambuzi. He mentioned that both developed and developing countries should be involved in reducing extreme poverty.

Kashambuzi cited specific examples of positive changes instituted in Millennium Villages, such as clinics, anti-malaria drugs, assistance to pregnant women and safe drinking water.

During the videoconference Monday, Sachs emphasized that the United States needs to be much more involved in combating extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, noting what he considered to be excessive military spending. He also emphasized the importance of student activism.

"We need students to be engaged across the country," he said.