Siobhan Kelley, Class of 2012: Education Coordinator for STAND and President of ONE Campus.

Siobhan Kelley, Class of 2012: Education Coordinator for STAND and President of ONE Campus.
 
Do you want to start us off by introducing yourself?
Sure! I’m a senior here at Clark and an International Development major, Political Science minor. I’m currently starting fifth year for IDSC (International Development and Social Change). On campus, I’m involved in STAND– I’m the Education Coordinator for the chapter on campus and I’m also the Education Coordinator on the Congo for the national chapter, because it’s all student-run. So every week I write a little education update on the Congo that goes out to all the chapters.
 
How many chapters are there?
There’s at least one in every state. Actually, there are high school chapters, too, which is pretty impressive. My high school didn’t have STAND, but I learned about it in high school. So it’s actually completely student-run, very grass roots, which is awesome.
 
Then, I’m also the President of ONE on campus. I’ve been involved with STAND and ONE since my sophomore year. I’m also involved in the District Chair for Care-International, which is a women’s anti-poverty organization. I co-sponsor things with ONE because they’re both partners. So I have a national calling party for the famine in the horn of Africa through ONE, but technically through Care.
 
So explain a little about STAND – what it is and what it means to be a part of it.
It was originally started for the genocide going on in Darfur – so it’s Students Taking Action out for Darfur – but it has really grown to be about human rights violations in general. It focuses generally on genocide, but also particularly on places such as the Congo, where there are massive human rights violations but it wouldn’t necessarily be defined as genocide. There are chapters in every state, both at high school and college levels. It’s completely student run, so there is a student director and he’s a junior in college – I don’t know he balances it every day. There is also a managing committee, which is made up of twelve people. They’re in charge for the entire advocacy for STAND and education for STAND, just pretty much any program STAND puts on nationally. Beneath every person on this committee is a task force, and I’m on the education task force. I focus on the Congo, which has been my passion since my freshman year, when I first learned about conflict minerals. So that’s what I’ve been doing not just on a national level, but here at Clark as well. Here, as the Education Coordinator, I’m technically in charge with keeping the campus up to date on all the different conflict STAND focuses on, which is Sudan, Congo, and right now we’re learning a lot about Libya and Syria. In the past we’ve talked about Burma-– it’s not an official STAND crisis anymore, which is unfortunate because it obviously is still going on, but the focus is on the ones that we could really make the most change about.
 
Even though we talk about all these different issues, Congo is still what I am most passionate about. So last year is when we started the conflict-free initiative. We started at the beginning of Fall Semester 2010, and it went all year, culminating in the passing of the first University Purchasing Policy in the United States, which is pretty cool.
 
Can you explain more about this Purchasing Policy?
In Eastern Congo there are minerals used by militia groups to perpetuate the instability and violence in the region. They take these minerals that are used in all of our every day electronics and they sell them to different companies in China and Southeast Asia, who then put them into products that are sold in US markets. As a university, we are huge consumers of electronics, so this is a great place to start changing our behavior, and also promote conflict free technology. This doesn’t exist yet, but if we show that an entire university doesn’t want to have conflict minerals in their electronics, then hopefully this will create some sort of market for it. There are three different types of these conflict free policies, and ours is a purchasing policy. It says that when ITS and Paul Wykes and the Business Department are looking into contracts with electronic companies, they are going to say that this is one of the prerequisites— you have to be doing better about using conflict minerals. Certain companies do a lot better than others, such as Hewlett Packard and Dell, which are actually two of the biggest manufacturers of electronics on Clark’s campus. Basically it’s us, as consumers, favoring companies that are doing better about using conflict minerals.
 
Stanford was the first school to start doing this, and I think there are nine schools now that have passed policies, and around 70 that are working on it. It was Rachel Gore, Emma Craig, Maggie Federici, Katherine Rothschild, and myself who really worked on this a lot. And when I went abroad second semester it was Rachel and Emma who met with the Board of Trustees and President Angel to pass a formal resolution. It took a lot of work.
 
Can you explain what ONE is, and what your role in it is?
ONE is the largest nonprofit organization in the United States. People mostly have heard about it because it was started by Bono, but it is much more serious than that. Pretty much it’s saying that we are one voice working to eradicate poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa. It’s not an organization asking for money, but more for your voice. As constituents, we can pressure our elected officials to make things such as foreign aid a priority. They have different issues that they focus on, like HIV/AIDS, sustainable agriculture, and governance development assistance. ONE Campus is the campus version of ONE. There are almost 3,000 schools that have a chapter of ONE on their campus, and we compete against each other to raise awareness on our campus. We get points for having a meeting, having an event, meeting with an elected official, calling our elected official, anything like that. Clark right now is number six, out of 3,000 schools. We came in fifth two years ago, and third last year. It’s hard sometimes for Clark to compete numbers-wise, but we are really good at events. I’m the president of ONE Campus, so I focus a lot on educating the chapter about what we’re advocating for, and also working a lot on advocacy and reaching out to our elected officials. We met with representative James McGovern last semester, who has been a huge champion of ONE’s issues. His personal issue in our community is hunger, and he also focuses a lot on hunger abroad. He wants foreign aid to
be the highest level it can be. It was a really inspiring discussion; he was talking about how we need political will in the United States.
 
Any last thoughts about involvement in clubs on campus?
Being in clubs has defined my Clark experience. It’s basically what I want to do with my life- work for the organizations that I work with on campus. Doing social activism and things like that has really shaped what I want to do with my life, so I feel like getting involved on campus is one of the best ways to figure out what you’re interested in. It’s also such good networking! I’ve met awesome people from both ONE and STAND that I definitely look forward to talking to in the future. Especially if you’re into a certain issue– why not get involved and start getting to know people now, because these are the people that are going to be in it later.