Former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards will be among the speakers at an MIT conference April 18-20 involving more than 1,000 students from around the country dedicated to fighting the problems of extreme poverty in the world.
The inaugural Millennium Campus Conference, organized by a coalition of student groups including MIT's Global Poverty Initiative, will feature talks and discussions about international development and steps toward developing sustainable strategies against poverty. The group was founded with a goal of furthering the United Nations' Millennium Development goals.
Edwards is scheduled to deliver an opening keynote speech at 10 a.m. Friday in Kresge Auditorium. Other scheduled speakers during the three-day conference include MIT senior lecturer Amy Smith, anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer and economists Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Romer.
Henrietta H. Fore, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development and director of United States Foreign Assistance, will also be participating in the meeting's opening ceremonies.
The conference will feature a variety of luncheons, workshops and exhibits to promote networking among college campus organizations. Other major programming activities include the Millennium Campus Concert, hosted by Brad Corrigan of Dispatch, which will take place on April 19 at the Roxy, and the Millennium Campus Cup--a soccer tournament to benefit Grassroots Soccer HIV/AIDS education in Zimbabwe.
For more info, visit http://www.mcnpartners.org or http://gpi.mit.edu/.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 16, 2008 (download PDF).
