Senator Christopher Bond

ONE Webster – Webster University’s ONE Campus Challenge group – put together quite the event for “Stand Up and Take Action” on October 16 by getting 107 petition signatures to Missouri Senator Christopher Bond. The petition asked the senator to stand up for the world’s poor by co-sponsoring the Foreign Assistance Revitalization and Accountability Act (S. 1524). Today, we delivered it.

ONE Webster President Kritter Keirnan, Secretary Ellie Curran and I met with Senator Bond’s Foreign Policy Legislative Assistant, Michael DuBois, and Community Liaison Peggy Barnhart. We began by thanking the senator for co-sponsoring the Water for the World Act (S. 624), legislation that will provide 100 million more people with clean drinking water by 2015. When we presented the petitions, Mike DuBois informed us that he had already been reading the S. 1524 legislation and was optimistic that the senator would sign on very soon. He explained that the bill is congruent with the senator’s beliefs regarding smart power and was a complement to the America’s Global Development Capacity Act (S. 355) that he co-sponsored earlier this year.

Senator Bond has been a champion for the extreme poor in the Senate as of late and he recently co-authored a book that discusses smart power and the importance of US foreign aid to developing countries in southeast Asia. We presented his staffers with an invitation from Webster University President Elizabeth Stoble to speak about these ideas on our campus. They were very open to the idea and promised to pass the invitation along to the senator.

ONE Webster is very excited about the outcome of today’s meeting and we hope we will soon be planning an event for Senator Bond to speak at!

-Nick Stevens, Founder and Online Communications Director for ONE Webster