Social Justice

'We must become the change we want to see in the world'
(Mahatma Gandhi)

The music of U2 has always been about heart and mind, body and soul. Down the years the band have succesfully thrown a spotlight on the work of key campaigning groups who are trying to make the world a better place.

U2 have used benefit concerts, songwriting, public campaigning, special visits and fund-raising projects to promote a range of charities and activist communities worldwide

If you click on the logos, you will be taken to more information about some of the key organisations that U2 support - and discover ways in which you can also support them.

		DATA (debt, AIDS, trade, Africa) is an advocacy organization founded in 2002 by Bono, Bobby Shriver and activists from the Jubilee "Drop the Debt" campaign to fight AIDS and extreme poverty in Africa. DATA (www.data.org) also advocates for increased democracy, accountability and transparency in governance so that Africa's citizens have a greater voice in how resources are being used. In 2002 and 2003, DATA worked with the White House and Congress to secure a pledge of $15 billion over five years to fight AIDS in Africa through treatment and prevention programs, and an additional $10 billion over three years for development programs in well-governed poor countries. In 2005, DATA and partner campaigns from around the world helped to persuade the G8 to reach an unprecedented agreement on Africa that included broad debt cancellation, universal access to education, AIDS treatment and more effective development assistance. DATA continues to work to ensure these promises are kept and built upon.
		ONE (www.ONE.org) is a growing grassroots movement of over 2.4 million people and more than 100 of the nation's leading relief, humanitarian and advocacy organizations working together to fight the global emergency of AIDS and extreme poverty. ONE members are Americans of all beliefs and every walk of life who are raising their voices as ONE so that decision makers will do more to save millions of lives in the poorest countries. ONE believes that allocating an additional 1% of the U.S. budget toward providing basic needs like health, education, clean water and food would transform the futures and hopes of an entire generation in the world's poorest countries. Visit ONE.org
		(RED)'s (www.joinred.com) primary objective is to engage the private sector in raising awareness and funds for the Global Fund to help fight AIDS in Africa. Companies whose products take on the (PRODUCT) RED mark contribute a significant percentage of the sales or portion of the profits from that product to the Global Fund to finance AIDS programs in Africa, with an emphasis on the health of women and children. Current partners are: American Express (U.K. only), Apple, Converse, Gap, Giorgio Armani and Motorola. MySpace.com is the first media sponsor in the United Kingdom. Visit JOINRED.com
		EDUN (www.edun.ie) EDUN is a socially-conscious clothing company launched in Spring 2005 by Ali Hewson and Bono with designer Rogan Gregory. EDUN brings the issue of sustainable employment to the world of high fashion, utilizing ethically-sound factories in developing areas such as Africa, India and South America. Visit edun.ie

• Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart's full of hope, you can be persistent when you can't be optimistic. You can keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. So while I'm not optimistic, I'm always very hopeful." Quoted in his NPR obituary

• In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power, and for the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent." — In the Yale Alumni magazine in 1967

• The U.S. government should have vowed "...to see justice done, but by the force of law only, never by the law of force.— After September 11, 2001

• We yearned for a revolution of imagination and compassion that would oppose the very aggressiveness and antagonism that characterized the actions of both Nixon and the Weathermen. We were convinced nonviolence was more revolutionary than violence" — referring to the organizers of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam

• Without love violence will change the world; it will change it into a more violent one.— June 1968

• It's too bad that one has to conceive of sports as being the only arena where risks are, [for] all of life is risk exercise. That's the only way to live more freely, and more interestingly.

• The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.

• What we and other nuclear powers are practicing is really nuclear apartheid. A handful of nations have arrogated to themselves the right to build, deploy, and threaten to use nuclear weapons while policing the rest of the world against their production. . . . Nuclear apartheid is utopian and arrogant. It is a recipe for proliferation, a policy of disaster.

• Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and defends them on the basis of morality." — to the Yale Class of 1968 35th reunion, May 2003

• Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat.

• For Christians, the problem is not how to reconcile homosexuality with scriptural passages that condemn it, but how to reconcile the rejection and punishment of homosexuals with the love of Christ." - An Open Letter from Rev. William Sloane Coffin to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops 2000

• Many of us are eager to respond to injustice, as long as we can do so without having to confront the causes of it. There's the great pitfall of charity. Handouts to needy individuals are genuine, necessary responses to injustice, but they do not necessarily face the reason for injustice. And that is why so many business and governmental leaders today are promoting charity; it is desperately needed in an economy whose prosperity is based on growing inequality.

• First these leaders proclaim themselves experts on matters economic, and prove it by taking the most out of the economy! Then they promote charity as if it were the work of the church, finally telling us troubled clergy to shut up and bless the economy as once we blessed the battleships." - as quoted by Rev. Scotty McLennan

• To be avoided at all costs is the solace of opinion without the pain of thought

• President Bush Jr. rightly spoke of an "axis of evil," but it is not Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Here is a more likely trio calling for Herculean efforts to defeat: environment degradation, pandemic poverty, and a world awash with weapons

• We are on the road to heaven if today we walk with God. Eternal life is not a possession conferred at death; it is a present endowment. We live it now and continue through death. With God, "time is eternity in disguise" (Heschel)

• If you're at the edge of an abyss the only progressive step is backward!

• Our faith should quell our fears, never our courage

• Hell is truth seen too late