Like many of you, we’ve been pretty busy over the past 100 days at Stanford STAND. So for our Day 100 event we wanted to highlight what our community has been doing to push for change in Darfur in contrast with the Obama Administration has done in the same amount of time.
This Wednesday, we’ll be setting up tables in a main part of our campus with three poster boards. One board will have headlines highlighting events in Darfur over the past 100 Days. Another will have sticky notes with all the things our community has done: “I wrote a letter for Darfur” (we’ll hopefully have hundreds of those!), “I met with my Member of Congress”, “I helped raise $8,000 for Darfur” and the like. We will have phones and faxing available at the table so anybody who sees the posters and stops by can add immediately do something and add their action to the board. We are also placing instructions for faxing over the internet in libraries across campus so that people can do Darfur advocacy while they work. The last board will have three sticky notes representing what President Obama has done: appointed a Special Envoy, met with Darfur Activists, and started a review of the administration’s policy on Sudan. Last, at the end of the day, we are hosting a concert in the campus coffee house to bring everybody together and hopefully get some more letters signed and phone calls made.
We also just finished a movie that highlights the startling lack of action coming from the White House in the light of all of the activism coming from the college campuses – we’ll be hitting our email lists with this and attach easy directions for action.
The day should be a mix of advocacy, awareness and art! We are pretty excited.
-Angie McPhaul, Advocacy Coordinator, Stanford University STAND