That code would work, but I generally avoid nesting elements that are of the same class. There is nothing wrong with having more than one element of the same class on the same page, but if you are going to nest one inside the other, you may want individual style control over the elements in case it doesnt end up behaving how you want it to. You could also keep them in the same class and add unique IDs to each element in case that ends up being an issue as well. For example:
HTML:
<div class="generic_main_panel_full_width">
<div class="generic_body_text" id="outer_div_1">
<p>sentence will be here</p>
<div class="generic_body_text" id="inner_div_1"><ul><li><a href="money-order.html">World Health Fund</a> (May 1, 2011)</li></ul></div>
<p class="view_more"><a href="contributions_2.html">View older items</a></p>
</div></div>
then you could give the divs an overall class by defining the "generic_body_text" in your CSS and if you need to add a specific style element to one div or the other then you just reference the id instead of the class and add your unique properties like so:
CSS:
#outer_div_1{
border:thin solid;
border-color:#000000;
}
#inner_div_1{
border:thick solid;
border-color:#656464;
}
technically there are other ways to do it as well, such as navigating the DOM in your CSS. I don't prefer to do that, its a little clunky to me. It's much easier(if you have access to the HTML) to add unique ids or have a larger variant of classes to assign.