Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Thinking globally and acting locally

In a competition involving more than 1,000 colleges and universities, students at UNLV excel at increasing awareness of world poverty

One

Steve Marcus

Heather Brown, president of the ONE campaign at UNLV, looks over artwork created by students during a “day of awareness” in March. ONE works to increase awareness of global poverty and economic issues. UNLV’s chapter has found lots of members in a student body many think is too busy for activism.

We’ve heard it all before.

UNLV students are apathetic. The school is full of commuters, and people juggling classes, jobs and children simply don’t have time for extracurricular activities on campus.

But this year, student leaders have proven that lethargy need not always be the hallmark of their student body’s reputation.

In a nationwide competition among more than 1,000 colleges to increase awareness of global poverty, UNLV landed in the top 10.

In the ONE Campus Challenge, the school beat every campus in the University of California system, Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale, and, sweetest of all, University of Nevada, Reno. A panel of judges ranked UNLV third, and members of ONE, the nonprofit organization hosting the competition, ranked the school seventh.

“I was surprised,” said Matt Higginson, Western states director for ONE.

“Las Vegas and UNLV have, obviously, a disproven reputation for not being volunteerism-oriented,” he said.

So how did students manage to buck that apathetic image?

The students’ passion for their cause was key to their campaign’s success, Higginson said.

Rebecca Hoffer, a political science student who founded UNLV’s ONE chapter before graduating last semester, persuaded professors to give her class time to talk about eradicating poverty. Leaders plastered their campus with fliers about their events and held news conferences to tout their work.

The young people who spearheaded the effort said they had personal reasons to care.

Adriel Espinoza, student body president, said that as a 12-year-old, he journeyed to Tlacuitapa, the rural town in Mexico where his parents had grown up.

He recalls seeing children like him working in the fields, cutting and carrying stalks of corn on their backs.

“That stuck with me forever,” he said. “I saw what true poverty is, and true hunger is, and I thank God I never suffered or had to deal with that. So a campaign like this just really brings those memories back.”

Michael Lyle, a member of UNLV’s ONE chapter, recalls seeing a photograph at a ONE event of a 9-year-old rape victim with AIDS.

“Her face is forever burned into my brain,” said Lyle, a senior studying journalism. “There are faces like that that are burned into your heart.”

Under the ONE Campus Challenge, which launched in fall, students earned points for their schools by completing tasks such as persuading college athletes to wear ONE gear and getting media coverage of ONE activities.

The first major event UNLV’s ONE chapter held was a November concert that dovetailed with the Democratic debate the university was hosting. Two local bands performed, and representatives of all the major Democratic candidates’ campaigns spoke about poverty. More than 200 people joined ONE that night.

Unlike Higgins, Espinoza said he was not surprised by UNLV’s success. As at any other college, he said, students are willing to do community service as long as they believe in a cause.

In talking with fellow students about ONE, Espinoza emphasized that making a difference is easy — that calling a politician, for example, takes just a few moments.

For ONE leaders, though, it was hard work that paid off. Tedious, old-fashioned organizing helped them increase support for their ONE chapter. Members spent a lot of time chatting one-on-one with strangers, asking them to sign a declaration supporting spending a larger share of the U.S budget on fighting poverty.

Before the campaign’s final event in late March, Heather Brown, president of UNLV’s ONE chapter, e-mailed every student group at the school, asking them to encourage their members to attend. She personally contacted student leaders she knew.

At that last event, more than 20 groups set up booths where passers-by could learn about poverty and disease — how many people are living with HIV (more than 33.2 million, according to the United Nations), how many go hungry each day (one in eight), and how many live on less than $1 per day (about 1 billion).

That day, about 1,200 students signed the ONE declaration. Attendees made dozens of calls to Sens. Harry Reid and John Ensign, talking to the senators’ staffers about the importance of battling poverty.

In all, during the competition, UNLV’s chapter persuaded nearly 2,000 people to join ONE. The effort caught the attention of university system Chancellor Jim Rogers, who will pay for a ONE student to travel to Ethiopia this summer to build homes with Habitat for Humanity. The student is to be chosen at the end of the month.

Brown, a senior studying political science, said the students’ successful campaign proved what she had always known — that the UNLV community is not apathetic. Perhaps the university is just a sleeping giant that needs a bit of prodding and inspiration to wake up.

“We face this whole, ‘You’re a commuter campus, you can’t do X, Y and Z, you’re not like these universities that have a community culture,’ ” Brown said. “That always frustrated me because I never felt like this was a commuter school and I couldn’t get involved.”

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