New club to help United Nations, ONE campaigns
USU student Evelyn Sardinas has single handedly taken on a local effort to help national and worldwide campaigns to eradicate poverty, fight disease, promote sustainability, and improve education and gender equality.
Sardinas has started two local chapters of ONE to help raise awareness of these issues. In March, she began ONE Logan and, as of Wednesday, USU as ONE. Sardinas organized these groups to help support the United Nations and ONE campaigns working to make poverty a thing of the past and improve other social issues around the world.
In 2000, the UN established Millennial Development Goals (MDGs). Listed on www.un.org, the MDGs are: to stamp out extreme hunger and poverty, have universal primary education, promote gender equality and the empowerment of women, lower child mortality, improve maternal health, fight HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability and create a global partnership for development. The UN has pledged to achieve these eight goals by 2015.
ONE, a national campaign, was started in part to help the UN achieve their goals of radically improving world conditions. ONE is conducting a campus challenge, awarding schools for their efforts to help the fight. It was this challenge that prompted Sardinas to start a campus organization.
“I’m extremely excited to work with the population at the university to bring awareness to issues and get students at USU motivated and active,” Sardinas said. “I really hope to get people excited about the club.”
The main purpose of the club, she said, is to raise awareness. Sardinas, senior majoring in FCHD, said she hopes raised awareness translates into action.
“As world citizens we should do our part to ensure that our government is doing its share to uphold the Millennium Development Goals. This is a respectable goal but nothing will be gained if that is all it is, a goal,” she said.
Supporting and working toward all eight goals established by the UN, Sardinas said there is an issue for everyone.
“I believe that everyone can find an issue that they have strong feelings about and want to see improved,” she said.
Sardinas said her interest in helping ONE and the UN originates with the influence some of the issues have had on her personally. As a single mother of three, she said issues like poverty and gender equality have affected her.
“A couple of issues have touched me personally although not to the degree of those living in underdeveloped nations, like poverty and gender equality” she said. “Women are still not equal. It is not to the level of third world countries but these are issues I personally know of in my society.”
After ONE Logan didn’t generate a lot of involvement, Sardinas said she thought a club on campus would be more successful because students would be interested and there would be more opportunities for an organization to grow. Without numbers, she said her desire to help cannot be fulfilled.
“This is really unobtainable to me. My heart is in it but I really can’t do it on my own,” Sardinas said.
It is time for people to start caring and seeing the world as it really is, she said.
“I truly believe it is time we not only see each other as a global community for business practices, but for humanitarian reasons as well. I would like for my three children to carry on these ideals. Hopefully we can create a better world for future generations,” Sardinas said. “As an FCHD major, I also believe that if our society still has people in need, we are affected. We are all connected. I am really of that school of thought.”
The smallest action can help, she said. By starting USU as ONE, Sardinas said she is simply asking students to lend their voice. The issues highlighted by the UN restrict lives all around the world and Sardinas said there is no place for those injustices. Now is the time to make a difference and she said she hopes people take advantage of the opportunity she is offering them.
She said, “What if that was me? What if that was me in Africa? I would want someone to care.”
-arie.k@aggiemail.usu.edu