If all goes according to plan, on Friday, Dec. 3, over 40 student groups, vendors and local nongovernmental organizations will gather in the Mayer Campus Center for the second annual OneWorld Global Crafts Bazaar. They will sell fairly traded goods made by artisans from all over the developing world, educate the community about issues facing various impoverished communities, and promote innovative and sustainable solutions to poverty and ways for students to get involved.
So what is this all about? What is OneWorld? When it started almost two years ago, OneWorld's vision was simple: Gather the many student organizations on campus together in one place at one time to champion the work being done to make the world a better place. The idea was to channel the energy that the Tufts community devotes to making positive change into one collaborative event that would showcase and give a jolt to the commitment to active, global citizenship that is at the core of the Tufts brand.
Slowly OneWorld turned into an initiative to promote action for poverty alleviation. Why? We try to promote as many different answers to this question as possible, but this year we're focusing on one in particular: because we are young. Our generation is the largest in American history, and we are slowly inheriting this world. The rising cohort of youth is by definition going to take this world to places it has never been before. The youth are the cutting edge of humanity, and right now hundreds of millions of us are living in extreme poverty. By virtue of little else other than where they are born, for every college student in America who may be pulling an all-nighter, there are 2,000 children between the ages of five and 14 laboring around the clock in hazardous mines, fields and factories around the world.
While we at Tufts are often reminded of and, frankly, anxious about our impending assumption of leadership in the world, many youth live with no hope, encouragement, preparation or means to shape a vision of the future. We cannot necessarily solve these problems of the poor, nor are we necessarily to blame for the problems' persistence, but surely we can take responsibility for doing what we can to pursue a hopeful future, and we can commit ourselves in some small way to the unfolding process of human progress and improvement.
Of course, the number of student groups at Tufts that are already engaged in fighting poverty and inequality of all kinds locally and around the world is inspiring, if not a little overwhelming. In this way, Tufts stands to model the fact that poverty is an issue as complex as the world that bears witness to it. We hope that the bazaar can serve as an opportunity to embrace and celebrate that complexity, which is inherent in both global issues and our own community.
That being said, having the luxury to live on a campus where battles for social justice, equality and world consciousness have become mainstream means that we have to work extra hard not to take these concerns for granted. It is our hope that by bringing all of these groups together, the bazaar can be as much about appreciating the work already being done as it is about promoting further action.
In the end, the bazaar is about both recognizing that there is no one single way to contribute to the improvement of the world as well as insisting that different people and organizations need not act in isolation in those pursuits. Ultimately, OneWorld's mission is to address the fact that while Tufts is an altogether socially conscious and globally sensitive campus, the groups concerned with these issues act largely in isolation from one another.
In order to do justice to the amount of commitment on this campus to address the world's most challenging issues — that is, in order to take full advantage of all the potential for Tufts students to make a mark on the world — we must act together. We hope that through programming like the OneWorld bazaar and other collaborative events in the future, we can create an environment in which we can all explore how we can be greater than the sum of our parts.
We hope to see you there.
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Ben Perlstein is a sophomore majoring in International Relations. Taarika Sridhar is a sophomore majoring in political science. They are both members of OneWorld.
