Brandeis is currently the top-ranked university in the ONE Campus Challenge, an effort among 1,200 schools to get students involved in defeating poverty. Positive Foundations, a student-run organization founded in 2005 that is running Brandeis' involvement in the campaign, has been organizing initiatives like this one with the goal of working toward eliminating extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and other Third-World countries, according to Allyson Goldsmith '10, an active member of both the ONE chapter at the University and of Positive Foundations.

The ONE challenge is a "campaign to make poverty history," said Sam Vaghar '08, Positive Foundations' founder. It was founded in 2004 by 11 nongovernment organizations. With U2's lead singer Bono as its spokesperson, ONE looks to alter U.S. foreign policy by changing items such as the foreign aid policy and debt cancellation, Vaghar said.

The challenge consists of awarding different point values to acts that raise awareness on campus and surrounding communities. Initiatives such as writing to a senator or presidential candidate, sending out a campuswide e-mail about poverty, or being declared a ONE campus all helped push Brandeis to the No. 1 spot on the charts.

University President Jehuda Reinharz recently agreed to sign the ONE proclamation, securing Brandeis' status as a ONE campus. "This shows solidarity between the students and the administration," Goldsmith said. The proclamation is especially important because it proves that "Brandeis University thinks poverty is an important issue that needs to be discussed," she said.

The first phase of the competition ends Feb. 14. On this date, the top ten schools will receive $1,000 to stage an event to spread awareness of the extreme poverty issue. Photos, blogs, videos and descriptions of the events will be posted online, and everybody registered with the ONE campaign will vote on the event they believe to be the best. As Brandeis is currently in the No. 1 spot, Positive Foundations and the Brandeis chapter of ONE will be organizing an event in the spring. It will be a "really big awareness building event that will be a lot of fun," Goldsmith said, although she is not sure yet what the activity will be.

Positive Foundations was voted the best club on campus last year by the Student Union, Goldsmith said. Vaghar said that the organization's commitment to social action is based on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals to eradicate extreme poverty.

The United Nation's goals involve cutting poverty in half by 2015 and halting the spread of HIV and AIDS. Positive Foundations tries to raise awareness for these issues through events such as the Millennium Campus Network, in which all the anti-poverty organizations on college campuses throughout Boston rally together, as well as academic panels featuring Brandeis faculty and a Communiversity course.

The results of the competition will be known later this spring, but the most important thing to come out of the ONE campaign is awareness and action, according to Vaghar. "People start to see it, hear about it and hopefully act on it," Vaghar said. "Students are a driving force for change.