By Tejal Patel
The University chapter of the ONE Campaign, an organization that aims to help Americans raise their voice as one unified group against the emergency of AIDS and extreme poverty, won the third weekly campus challenge last week. This is the second time the University club has won a challenge.
Last week’s challenge was to send in the best ONE photo. Meaghan Davidson, the director of student relations for Hofstra ONE, submitted a photo of her 6-month-old puppy, Dylan, wearing a ONE T-shirt.
“I honestly didn’t decide to use Dylan for the picture contest,” Davidson said. “I submitted his picture for the ‘ONE your pet’ part. Come Monday night, [Oct. 29] when they put up the polls, I saw Dylan was one of the finalists.”
Davidson had her parents take a picture of Dylan and e-mail it to her. She then submitted the picture for the sole reason of receiving 75 points for the University.
According to the ONE Web site, the regular weekly photo contest was turned into the weekly challenge and “when we couldn’t decide which photo deserved the grand prize we opened it up to voting.”
Dylan, one of four finalists, won the challenge with 42 percent of the vote. “I e-mailed everyone I knew to get people to vote,” Davidson said. “As soon as I saw it was Dylan as a finalist, I alerted the ONE e-board.”
For two days, ONE members told as many people as they could about the challenge in hopes that they would go to the ONE Web site and vote for Dylan. A mass e-mail was sent to all ONE Facebook members and then each person took care of telling friends and family.
The University received 10,000 points for winning the challenge. In addition, Dana Dellevoet and another member of the ONE Campaign flew out from Los Angeles on Monday night to present the University’s ONE organization with 100 ONE T-shirts and free food.
“I really hope we keep winning challenges, it really inspires us to go out and do some good when we get recognized for the hard work we’ve done,” said Kaytee Lozier, a co-president of the ONE campaign at the University.
The University is currently in first place with 151,045 points.
Editor’s note: Kaytee Lozier is a staff writer for The Chronicle.
Members of the Hofstra ONE Campaign pose wearing T-shirts presented to them by Dana Dellevoet and another member who flew to the University from Los Angeles. (Jeffrey Herman)