The University’s Up to Us team, which led a campaign aimed at raising awareness about the national debt, was awarded first place in the six-week national Up-to-Us competition this weekend. The five-person group traveled to St. Louis Saturday for the Clinton Global Initiative Conference where former President Bill Clinton and other prominent leaders presented them with a $10,000 award.
Universities’ campaigns from across the nation were judged by a team of national debt experts on the basis of the number of students engaged, the level of student awareness after six weeks, and creativity, among other metrics.
The all fourth-year student team consisted of Batten students Lena Shi, Ryan Singel and Alan Safferson, Engineering student Josh Lansford and College student Amara Warren. The campaign was nonpartisan and educational, not advocating any specific solution.
With the prize money, the team plans to sponsor policy- and debt-related internships this summer, as well as academic research about fiscal issues. A portion of the money will also be used to support students interested in continuing the campaign.
“Winning the competition … really inspired our team to take on greater challenges in the field of public policy, really opened our eyes to the fact that young people really can make a difference,” Safferson said.
Just the interest costs alone on the $16 trillion national debt will soon total $300 billion a year, Shi said.
“If we’re spending that much on interest, then that squeezes out all the possibility for funding education, health, aid and development programs — things that we really care about for certain people and certain populations,” Shi said. “That’s what really hit home for us [and] motivated us.”
The team organized 31 events which were attended by more than 1,400 participants in total, including flash seminars, a TED Talk and a bipartisan forum between the College Republicans and the University Democrats.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) also joined the student campaign, addressing the University about the national debt in February.
The University team reached out to the other collegiate teams across the country to plan a trip to meet with Warner in Washington, D.C. and to find a meaningful way to measure their impact.
“We also tried to get other students all around the nation to care about this and to know that we are actually trying to make a dent in this conversation,” Shi said.
Safferson said from the beginning, the project provided an opportunity to educate their generation about the potential future consequences of the debt.
“The national debt and our country’s fiscal issues are something that are critically important to specifically our generation, but at the same time something that is being largely ignored by the youth of America,” Safferson said. “[W]e wanted to go about changing that, engaging our peers and getting people really excited to take hold of their future.”
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