ONE campaign’s religious outreach

November 6, 2007 – 2:00 pm

Today, the ONE campaign is rolling out their ONE Sabbath initiative. As part of the roll-out they invited a bunch of bloggers to hear what they had to say including Matt Lewis from Townhall, Rev. Amy Butler from Calvary Baptist Church and Talk with the Preacher, Lane Hudson from HuffPo, CPS from GreenMountain Politics, and a couple of people from CrossLeft. On the call, there were a number of people whose name I did not catch, but it included Matt Anderson from Mere Orthodoxy and someone from Street Prophets.

Regular readers will know that I am pretty supportive of the ONE campaign on religious and international policy reasons. They have a great mission. They recognize that social change happens in the US by getting the buy-in of churches. Mark Brinkmoeller, their head of Coalitions, made the point quite clear that all progress in civil rights came from the churches. He is completely correct, and his background at explicitly religious groups like Bread for the World demonstrates a great model for accomplishing this kind of thing.

Mark made the argument quite well. And, unlike one of the first ONE blogger meetings, the bigots at Firedoglake weren’t there to bash believers. But something was strange. Secular and faith groups don’t know how to talk to each other. Every church that I have ever attended has an "Invitation to Give" in which the congregation is asked to open their wallets to help others. Missionaries come through asking for support and telling their stories. And in most cases –the only major exception that I know of is some people at the Southern Baptist’s International Missionary Board — the missionaries focus more on service than evangelism.

Getting churchy people to focus on poverty is like asking the fish in the water to swim. They are already doing it. My church runs an after-school program for poor DC kids 4 days a week, runs a day program once-a-week for chronically mentally ill, works with a whole bunch of DC groups to serve the needy in the region, founded the first women’s homeless shelter in DC in the 70s and still supports it, etc. And we give money to a bunch of international missionary groups.

Therefore, it is not surprising that most of the early ONE members came through their church partners. The people that I have met on the ground in early primary states have all been religious. If a movement comes together on ONE, it will be because religious people off all stripes and ideologies, the mainstream of America, mobilizes.

Will this drive the numbers on this? Will they change the priorities of Americans on this? What are the trade-offs? Do they need to just find more activists? Or do they need to really change the values and ideas of Americans on these issues? Those are different objectives. I don’t know which the ONE campaign really wants.

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Interview with ONE campaign volunteer

September 6, 2007 – 1:52 am

When I was at the New Hampshire GOP debate, I ran into a Republican who is a die-hard volunteer for the ONE campaign. Michael is a former Marine and told me a great story about sharing the ONE campaign’s vision with other Marines at a Rudy Giuliani event a couple of days prior. He focuses on national security, madrasas, etc.

UPDATE: I was rushing to get my content out, so I didn’t finish this. I also talked to a number of other volunteers and got some encouraging information about the ONE campaign in New Hampshire. First, they had told me previously that they really were reaching out to churches. It appears that, to some extent, this is true. They have gotten some significant support through the groups associated with the Micah Challenge. And a number of the local volunteers viewed themselves in the Rick Warren/Saddleback sphere. Second, there appears to be significant Republican support, although, interestingly, this seems unrelated to the church groups. Perhaps the veterans and moderate/business parts of the coalition in New Hampshire have been activated, while the conservative churches have not been as active. It does seem that the conservative churches, which are weaker in New Hampshire, just have not engaged. It will be interesting to see what happens here. All in all, they appear to have bodies and a significant degree of activation. And this week, I talked to a DC-based GOP consultant who tells me that the part of the campaign that he is responsible for is quite enormous.  We shall see where this goes.

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ONE’s activation (update)

August 15, 2007 – 12:20 pm

Last week, the ONE campaign released some polling about the support that they have. It claimed pretty deep support. I didn’t write on it because who says "no" when asked, "do you want to end international poverty?" Apparently there are a few people who won’t.  These numbers were not surprising to me. Back in 2005, the Program on International Policy Attitudes did a poll and found that 65% of Americans want to increase foreign aid to (Millenium Development Goal level) 0.7% of GDP per year. For the US, that would be about $77b.

The problem with this polling is that it doesn’t have a trade-off. What are you taking money from, etc. My involvement with PIPA, while I was a Hill Staffer, taught me that it is very, very hard to gauge, with polling at least, people’s dedication to these issues. So I asked ONE for some activation numbers. Here’s what they told me:

In February 2007, ONE members sent over 200,000 letters encouraging Congress to protect $1 billion in funding for the fight against extreme poverty and global disease.  …

In fall 2006, ONE members delivered over 250,000 letters to Capitol Hill, requesting that Congress help up to 300,000 Africans make a living through renewal of a special trade provision within the African Growth and Opportunity Act …

In one targeted campaign in 2005, ONE generated over 500,000 e-letters to President Bush asking for a historic deal for Africa. …

These are real numbers. Any organization that can produce 200,000 contacts to Congress is doing something right. It would be interesting to see a partisan and/or age breakdown. Are these college students? Are they churches? Who are they?

I would also want to know why the half-million to President Bush, but only half that to Congress. That sounds like an overwhelmingly Democratic list to me.

It seems to me that the challenge for the ONE Campaign is drive its numbers up and make sure that the coalition includes people from all parts of the political (although not necessarily ideological) spectrum. This shouldn’t be hard. Students, churches, businesses, etc. should be easy partners in this coalition.

Update: The ONE campaign responds with this:

the 2005 petition was our sign up petition for the 2005 Live8 concerts. The other actions were just that, actions. A whole lot more resources went into building our list that summer.

That makes lots of sense. Getting people to sign up once, the first time, is a lot easier than getting them to act again and again and again. And I want to be clear. I am very impressed by what the ONE campaign is achieving.

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ONE campaign

July 17, 2007 – 6:10 pm

So today, I had lunch with a bunch of bloggers (Patrick Ruffini and Joe Carter were the conservatives. I didn’t know any of the liberals) and staff from the ONE campaign, a bipartisan effort to raise awareness of international poverty issues.

I came in with several kinds of questions.

The first one was about success and scale. How do they measure it? What does it look like? Etc. It certainly sounds like they are encountering some degree of grassroots success. In NH, they have signed up 17,000 people. Now many of those are students, unreliables, or other. But this is still a pretty substantial number. The more interesting answer was what they considered success to be: long-term legislative change. They want a President who agrees with them, and they will almost certainly get that. They also want a Congress that agrees with them. That’s a lot harder.

At one point, the CEO Susan McCue, formerly Chief of Staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, made what was what I thought was a very clear statement. She said that the goal of the ONE campaign was to "make international poverty the next great social justice movement." I hear that on par with civil rights, suffrage, abolition, independence, etc. In a previous meeting, they had said that they wanted to develop a constituency for larger foreign aid, but I think that Susan’s statement above is much clearer and important.

The next question is about public education. It is clear that there are majorities in any Congress for increased foreign aid and that any President is likely to support large foreign aid budgets, at least by American standards. But the real problem for them is public education. Synching up the reality of our foreign aid budget with people’s perceptions will be quite hard, I believe. PIPA has done some excellent polling on this subject.

My final question was about what kind of activity they get. The deeper question is whether the ONE campaign is something that people feel deeply about, and therefore invest time and energy, or whether it is just an identity. They report, although I want to see real numbers, that they have had hundreds of thousands of emails or phone calls made by members. Let’s see what the numbers actually say.

In any case, the ONE campaign is a deeply, deeply ambitious program. It has strong bipartisan support (Bill Frist and Tom Daschle. Michael Gerson and Tony Podesta. Jack Oliver and Mike McCurry, etc.) It has strong support across the ideological spectrum. Susan McCue recognizes that the coalition that really enacts social change in America is students and churches. They have churches from across the ideological spectrum, and they are planning a Big ONE Sunday to engage their church coalition partners.

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