A university tapping into the potential of social media has become commonplace, but a university using social media to combat world hunger could be groundbreaking.
The current campaign of Auburn's war on hunger, "Why Care?," was designed to generate awareness and action, all through social media.
"'Why care?' is a social media campaign that we want to involve a lot of di\0x99fferent people from all walks of life, and from several di\0x99fferent universities all over the world," said Jennie Daniel, a student in the Hunger Studies Capstone course.
Created by students in the hunger studies capstone class of last spring semester, the same students decided to take an extra semester as an independent study under the hunger studies minor in order to continue working on the campaign.
\0x10The campaign's aim is to get social media users to take pictures of themselves with personalized messages stating their concern about the issue of hunger, both globally and at home, signed with their name and location.
\0x10They would then upload the image to the campaign's website, Twitter or Facebook page.
\0x10The purpose, Daniel said, is to have people publicly identify why they care about hunger, in an e\0x99ffort to instill a consciousness of the issue in others.
"The goal is to challenge them," course instructor Kate Thornton added. "You've told us why you care, now what are you going to do about it?"
Information on the websites, operated by the campaign, will provide supporters and visitors with resources they can use to transform their ideas into actions, whether it's through donations of canned goods or volunteering with humanitarian organizations, \0x10Thornton said.
"Over the summer it got picked up by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme, WFP. And it is going to hopefully be the capstone student campaign for World Food Day this year," \0x10Thornton said.
Auburn has been the lead academic partner with the WFP since 2004, after being asked to help further the new War on Hunger student initiative.
Dean of the College of Human Sciences June Henton and Director of External Relations Harriet Giles are credited with developing the relationship between Auburn and the WFP.
"Instead of launching a website or just a campaign, we began an actual University student movement. We founded an organization called Universities Fighting World Hunger," Thornton said.
According to the UFWH website, "the network consists of approximately 300 colleges and universities from around the world committed to making the eradication of hunger a core value of their institutions."
The model behind UFWH was intended to fuse academics with action in a cohesive way that could be repeated at other universities that joined the movement.
Vice President of Student A\0x99 airs Dr. Ainsley Carry said the major challenge for most universities is preparing the leadership and organizational skills of the students involved in the program.
He will be serving as coleader and partner of the UFWH initiative for the next two years.
Since the development of the UFWH at Auburn, the International Hunger Institute has also been established at the University.
It is under the banner of the UFWH that the "Why Care?" campaign was created.
In addition to involvement through social media on the Internet, students of the hunger studies capstone course said within the next few weeks they will be meeting on the concourse Fridays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. to encourage students unfamiliar with "Why Care?" to participate in the campaign.
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