Part 1 of my Beatitudes Society Blog

So, this week I am required as part of my fellowship to blog three times. This is the first one. Enjoy!


Greetings from Columbus, OH!

I’m currently sitting in the Port Columbus Airport waiting for a connecting flight through NY to finally arrive back in my summer hometown of Washington DC.

For those of you who may not know what Jubilee USA does, here’s a brief rundown. Jubilee is an organization committed, like many other organizations, to ending global poverty. Jubilee insists that debt cancellation for developing nations is one of the most important things we can do to fight poverty and achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Why debt relief? It turns out that many highly impoverished poor countries have borrowed money from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other lending sources and have been sacrificing the well being of their citizens in order to pay down their debts, some of which were acquired under brutal dictatorships. Lending conditionality, vulture funds, and high interest rates are the three main contributors to global poverty where debt is concerned, but I’ll spare you a lecture on odious and illegitimate debt.

This weekend I’ve had the opportunity to attend Jubilee’s annual grassroots organizing conference in Columbus, OH. It was a jam-packed weekend of speakers and workshops, panels and fun. I was assigned to camcorder and picture taking duty for most of the weekend which turned out to be perfect. It gave me the opportunity to walk around and meet lots of folks from all over the country and to sit in and record some very interesting workshops on debt relief. Organizing a conference, as a co-worker put it, is a lot like having a baby. It needs constant attention. Needless to say it was a busy weekend.

Later this week I’ll catch you up on some of the things I’ve been doing in the office. Here's what you can look forward to: I’ll continue putting together my network of seminarians, trying to come up with community leaders to participate in an interfaith dialogue about debt relief and analyzing data to help with some strategic planning. I’ll also give you some insider information about our upcoming fall campaigns, “Stop the Vulture Culture” and “Picture an End to Global Poverty: A Call to the Next President to Make Debt Relief a Serious Priority, and Appoint a Treasury Secretary Who Will Do the Same. (We’re trying to come up with a better name…)