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."

At the event, a video recording of Holocaust survivor and human rights activist Elie Wiesel was shown. Wiesel urged students to fight poverty at all costs.

"Few campaigns are worth the fight like the fight of poverty is," he said in the recording. "Poverty means shame. Not that the poor people should be shamed, but that we should be shamed that poor people are poor."

Positive Foundations member Aka Kovachikova '11 agreed with Wiesel's ideas.

"In the year 2015, the year that we should have reached the U.N.'s millennium goals, our generation will be fresh out of college, and we're the ones who are going to have to deal with the issues," she said. "It's our responsibility to humankind."

One of the event's coordinators, James Ansorge '09, thanked the students for their dedication and delivered a closing message.

"Every three seconds, someone dies as a result of extreme poverty," Ansorge said. "You are all crucial allies in the fight for a more hospitable world. Together we can change history to make poverty history so that kids in Africa aren't dying of mosquito bites."

Associate Dean of Student Life Jamele Adams also made an appearance, performing one of his well- known pieces of slam poetry.

"Humanity is priority," he said.

According to co-Executive Director of Positive foundations Sam Vaghar '08, Positive Foundations will continue to make humanity its priority. In the future, Vaghar hopes the club will raise money to aid villages in sub-Saharan Africa and hopefully to set up an exchange program with an African university.

"People need to realize the urgency of the crisis and how much their actions matter," Vaghar said. "And that's what this event helped to do.