Seton Hall's ONE campaign collected nearly 700 books to donate to FOCUS, a Hispanic center for community development in Newark.
According to Katie Leninger, educational chair for ONE at Seton Hall, the book drive that began in the last week of October and continued through this Sunday, Nov. 14 collected an array of children's, young adult, Spanish-English and textbooks.
"Since the club received a large number of college textbooks and adult novels, we also donated books to the Tully House, a program of Community Education Centers Inc. (CEC), that provides reentry treatment and education services for adult correctional populations in Newark," Leninger said.
The ONE campaign at Seton Hall embarked on a similar mission last year when they joined with hundreds of schools across the nation in an effort to support the Liberian Literacy Foundation, a group which, according to their website, sought to "electrify Liberian schools" by collecting "a million books for a million lives."
This year, however, the ONE campaign decided to focus its book-donating efforts on a more local scale.
"With support of the South Orange community, Columbia High School, Millburn Middle School and the South Orange Public Library, the ONE campaign was able to collect nearly 700 books," Leininger said. "FOCUS will be able to use the donated books and textbooks for their after-school and summer educational programs. The Tully House will use the book donations for its educational, vocational and GED training programs."
Leninger also said the purpose of these donations is to help support the promotion and realization of the UN Millennium Development Goals, which include ending poverty and hunger, universal education and gender equality.
The UN Millenium Development goals comprise a major portion of ONE's dogma.
ONE is an organization, started by U2 lead singer Bono, that in the past couple years has reached out to hundreds of campuses across the United States to challenge universities to act on various national and global issues, according to its website.
Seton Hall became a part of this campus challenge in 2007.
ONE's campus program, according to Leininger, "believes that the goal to achieve universal education is critical in our efforts to fight extreme poverty. Access to books is key to a child's academic achievement and should be a priority in our communities. "
The success of the book drive will hopefully carry over into upcoming projects for the ONE campaign at Seton Hall, which is planning on tabling for World's Aid Day on Dec. 1, and will soon hold a gift wrapping event at the Springfield Barnes & Noble to benefit the Global Fund for AIDS, tuberculosis and Malaria.
"Next semester, we hope to work with Yéle Haiti on an event to support their efforts and plan to host our second ‘Be Hope to Her' water walk for NURU International," Leninger said.
Patrick Wedlock can be reached at patrick.wedlock@student.shu.edu.
