Washington, DC – In the six months since New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady kicked-off this year’s ONE Campus Challenge, college students have made thousands of phone calls to Congress and held hundreds of events on campuses across the U.S. to raise awareness of extreme poverty and preventable disease. Today ONE announced the ten universities that – thanks to their poverty-fighting efforts – have earned a spot in the final round of the second annual ONE Campus Challenge. ONE also announced that the winning school will be rewarded with an on-campus performance by the band Vampire Weekend.

The top ten schools will compete against each other to win the ONE Campus Challenge and host the Vampire Weekend concert. Spin magazine declared Vampire Weekend “The Year’s Best New Band” in the March 2008 issue. Rolling Stone magazine dubbed their self-titled album the “10th best album of 2008” in the January 2009 issue. Their distinct sound is influenced by African popular music and Western classical music.

“The ONE Campus Challenge is ONE’s effort to empower, inform and mobilize the next generation of social justice activists. The students’ energy, idealism and creativity are unmatched, and they are accomplishing great things on campuses across the nation. This year we’ve seen students engage the presidential candidates on the campaign trail, lobby their Representatives and Senators around key initiatives and recruit thousands of new ONE members on their campuses. The final ten schools will use their grants to take their advocacy to the next level and impact larger audiences than ever before,” said David Lane, ONE President and CEO.

Lane continued, “The students energized the movement to make poverty history in this year’s ONE Campus Challenge and we’re returning the favor by sending Vampire Weekend to the winning school’s campus.”

The top ten schools are: Wright State University, Sacred Heart University, Baylor University, University of Southern California, University of California – Davis, Webster University, Curry College, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, Wofford College and University of Florida.

“Much of what these schools did to earn their spot in the top ten is easily measured. Some efforts were unusual and harder to quantify, such as Curry College’s. Curry is working to build a water well in a Sudanese village where one of their ONE Chapter members was born. That effort has taken almost two years to complete and their effort will help an entire community have access to clean water, which impacts general health, education and economic productivity,” said Maisie Pigeon, ONE’s Student Outreach Coordinator. “The ONE Campus Challenge is about inspiring effective advocacy, and the Curry students are a fantastic example of advocacy leading to action.”

ONE will provide each of the top ten schools with a $1,000 grant to build a project, program or event that draws attention to the global crises of poverty and disease, inspires people to action and helps build the political will to encourage elected leaders to support the proven solutions to these problems. At the end of March, a panel will review the projects to determine the most effective and impressive. The school with the best project will be declared the winner of this year’s ONE Campus Challenge and will receive an on-campus performance by Vampire Weekend in mid-April.

The winner of the first ONE Campus Challenge, Western Kentucky University, used their grant to transform the campus into an educational center and rally students around the crises of extreme poverty and preventable disease during an intensive 24-hour period that included signing up almost 2,000 new ONE members and writing more than 300 letters to Washington lawmakers in support of key legislation. The effort concluded with a high-profile event, with more than 300 students rallying together with Western Kentucky’s president and the mayor of Bowling Green to indicate their shared dedication to bringing attention to the conditions of extreme poverty around the world and promoting solutions to the crises.

The top ten schools earned their position by accumulating the most points in the first two rounds of the ONE Campus Challenge (one.org/campus). The ONE Campus Challenge (OCC) is a nationwide competition to provide students the tools they need to organize on campus, talk to elected officials and increase awareness of – and support for the proven solutions to address – the global crises of extreme poverty and preventable disease. Schools earned points with a variety of actions, including forming a ONE Chapter on their campus. Students use their ONE Chapters to cultivate a culture of activism on campus, to bring students interested in the issues together and organize around them in order to take their concerns directly to their local elected leaders.

Since Brady kicked off the second OCC in September 2008, ONE has rewarded students for reaching milestones as the OCC progresses, stoking the competition and encouraging participation. ONE’s use of cutting-edge Internet-based technologies gives students an unprecedented level of organization and involvement (one.org/campus). Brady’s video helping to kick-off the ONE Campus Challenge may be viewed here.

In February 2009, student leaders from the top 100 schools arrived in Washington, D.C., for an elite student summit. The Power 100 Summit stoked the competition as students learned from each other what was working on campus, and sized up the competition to make it to the finals. They not only learned from each other, but also from the best of what Washington, D.C., can offer in the form of policy experts, activists and political leaders. Among them were talk show host Jake Sasseville, Editor in Chief of Hotline Amy Walter, Washington Bureau Chief for the New York Post Charlie Hurt, Lauren Bush and Ellen Gustafson of The FEED Project, actor and founder of Shoe4Africa Anthony Edwards, Jim Kolbe with the German Marshall Fund and Peter Pham, Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs.