Miss Teen San Antonio International Makes the ONE Campaign her Platform

San Antonio, TX – Next month, Angelica Crispino will represent the greater San  Antonio area at the 2007 Miss Teen Texas International Pageant in San Antonio and has made fighting global disease and extreme poverty in Africa and elsewhere in the world’s poorest countries her platform. Crispino, 15 years old and a member of ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History, aims to increase the size of ONE’s local group, ONE San Antonio, by 100 members every month. Currently, ONE’s growing campaign to build a national grassroots constituency to fight global disease and extreme poverty has 2.4 million members nationwide.

“While living abroad, I witnessed firsthand the problems associated with poverty and visited orphanages with my family to help deliver food,” said Angelica Crispino. “Children growing up in communities that do not have access to basic human necessities – such as food, clean water, education and medicines – continue living in a vicious cycle. With our help, the world’s poorest people would have a chance to build a hopeful future for themselves and their families.”

Next week, during San Antonio’s Annual Fiesta Week, Angelica Crispino will setup a booth to educate area residents on ways to get involved with ONE. “Fighting extreme poverty and global disease around the world is something we can do together here at home,” said Crispino. “Together, as ONE, we can make a difference.”

Almost 150,000 Texas residents have joined ONE and over 10,000 members live in San Antonio. Dallas, Lubbock, Hudson Oaks and Weatherford have all been declared “Cities of ONE” in Texas. Crispino plans to work with local officials to name San Antonio a “City of ONE.”

ONE is an effort by Americans to rally Americans to fight the emergency of extreme poverty and global disease. Over 1 billion people around the world live on less than $1 a day and lack access to clean water. Every three seconds a child dies as a result of extreme poverty. Over 39.5 million people are living with HIV/AIDS around the world – and Africa has been hit harder by the HIV/AIDS virus than any other region. Today, solutions exist that are affordable, achievable and sustainable. The global community has the science, technology, tools and resources to beat global disease and extreme poverty but lacks the political will to fully fund them.

Through ONE.org and working on the ground in communities, colleges and churches in all 50 states, ONE members ask America’s leaders and candidates to increase efforts to fight global disease and extreme poverty, from the U.S budget and G8 summits to debt cancellation, increasing effective international assistance, making trade fair and fighting corruption. ONE supporters have sent millions of emails and made hundreds of thousands of phone calls to the President and Congress, asking that America do even more to lead the world in bringing hope and opportunity to the world’s poorest people.