Source: David Westfall, davidwes@k-state.edu
Friday, Jan. 11, 2008
K-STATE STUDENT'S INTEREST IN ENDING POVERTY TAKES HIM TO ELITE SUMMIT
MANHATTAN -- Kansas State University's David Westfall, graduate student in sociology, Arcadia, recently joined more than 120 student activists from across the U.S. at a special summit on ending poverty, the ONE Power 100 Summit, Jan. 2-5, in Washington, D.C.
Westfall is the leader of K-State's chapter of ONE, a campaign to make poverty history. The ONE initiative is to engage American college students in the fight against poverty and global disease.
Westfall earned an invitation to the summit by being a student leader at one of the top 100 ONE campuses nationwide, as determined by points accumulated through the ONE Campus Challenge. The challenge is a competition to get college students and their schools involved in the challenge. More than 20,000 students on 1,300 campuses nationwide are participating in the challenge.
"To earn his spot at the conference, David organized his peers to take actions that will create lasting change," said ONE's Kimberly Cadena. "The called their members of Congress. They recruited other students and they asked presidential candidates what they are doing to address these issues.
"This is a critical time in history, and students seizing the opportunity to make big things happen as we move to end extreme poverty and eradicate unnecessary diseases such as malaria around the world," Cadena said. "David is one of the many student leaders across the U.S. who will accomplish great things individually in the coming semester, but together they will change the world in their lifetimes."
The three-day summit offered students the opportunity to meet political and policy figures who have been involved in the fight against extreme poverty and disease, including Bill Frist, former Senate majority leader; Gene Sperling, Council on Foreign Relations; Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House; and Paul Begala, political contributor and a Democratic strategist on CNN. Other speakers included Jenna Bush; Suprotik Basu, public health specialist for the World Bank's booster program for malaria control in Africa and managing director of Malaria No More; Gayle Smith, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Sam Worthington, president and chief executive officer of InterAction.
"I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to attend the Power 100 Summit," Westfall said. "I would never have had the chance to see or interact with the speakers we heard or have the other opportunities we were given anywhere else. I will definitely apply what I learned at the Power 100 to what we're doing at K-State."
To help K-State in the ONE Campus Challenge, go to http://www.one.org/campus