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When I read about one of these instances of someone suffering, it really does just stick
in my head and it will just eat at me and if, I can't not do anything. People will say
I don't see how what I do is going to have an impact at all and, you know, the person
next to me is not doing anything, why should I do anything? Um, but you know, every single
action counts. We are all part of one global system and what we do definitely effects others.
IPL stands for Interfaith Power and Light and it is a moral response to climate change.
They don't talk about the science or the politics, they talk about the people who are being hurt
by our own over consumption of fossil fuels here. It's mostly reminding people the importance
of, you have to turn off the lights because when you use all of this carbon it's directly
hurting someone else. Demand is a group that I founded on campus that highlights the stable
solutions to poverty, most notably, fair trade and fair labor in the developing world in
order to end this cycle of poverty and allow the poor to lift themselves out of poverty.
Something that encouraged me to actually lead a group was, when I saw someone, that was
already leading a group, but wasn't actually living out the message that they were sending
themselves. I thought I could do something different from what the others were doing
and and possibly make it more clear through my own actions, the results that I was asking
of others. I try my absolute hardest to actually do what I'm asking others to do. When we ask
people to do actions like the ones that we request of them for Demand and IPL, they won't
immediately see the effects of their actions. They may never see the effects of their actions
because they may, you know, never travel abroad and see a child in the Ivory Coast who is
forced to pick cocoa beans, or a Pakistanian flood victim, but the impacts of what we ask
them to do are very real. The issues that Demand and IPL talk about are complex issues
that don't usually have a clear-cut solution, especially in the Demand case with the fair
labor. There's always a different situation, a different factory, a different farm, a different
plantation that will have a slightly varying issue and it will be in a different location
with a different culture. Small steps are very, very important and as a group, all of
these people coming together to take these small steps will have a huge impact and eventually
result in big change. These causes have captured my focus the most because I feel that they're
so preventable. I just feel strongly about this issue and want others desperately to
care about the world's poor and what we're doing here to effect them.