Top Action: Ask Your Member of Congress to Take Action on GAVI

Time is running short. The GAVI pledging conference is on June 13 in London. Can we get Congress to communicate to the president and his administration that the U.S. must go to London with a powerful request? The answer lies in your boldness in the coming weeks. How bold will you be?

Opportunity: Save 4.2 million children’s lives by 2015 with two new vaccinations to protect against rotavirus and pneumonia. With adequate funding, GAVI will make these new vaccinations available to kids in 44 countries. We need a three-year pledge totaling $450 million from the U.S. This pledge represents less than one-fifth of the overall need. The rest will come from other sources.

Some members of Congress will tell you that these are tough times and that we cannot continue spending money. We need to remind them that we elect them to lead and that all spending is not equal. Some spending cuts will result in tighter budgets, delayed projects, or less waste. Very few expenditures can promise to save millions of lives.

Here’s what you can do:

• WE NEED LEADERSHIP on a SIGN-ON LETTER to President Obama. Ask your member of Congress to become the lead sponsor of a bi-partisan sign-on letter to the president. You can send him/her this draft letter as a starter. If you need help making your request, please contact Ken Patterson or Lisa Marchal. We’d like President Obama to receive bi-partisan letters from both the Senate and the House with lots of signatures on them showing support for a bold U.S. pledge.
• Ask your member to send their own letter to the president. If your member of Congress is not willing to lead on a letter, ask him/her to write their own letter using our draft letter as a starting place.
• Generate media. Send our editorial packet to your local paper and ask them to write about GAVI. Or write your own write a letter to the editor using our online tool. For examples, see what activists Beth Wilson, Caroline Fleming, Nancy Gardiner, Ken Patterson, and Martha Clemons got published this weekend.
• Write to your member of Congress about GAVI and encourage others to do the same. Use our action alert to write to your member of Congress about the need to fund GAVI adequately in 2012 so that the world can undertake this critical vaccine initiative.