Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
announces the city's partnership with
anti-poverty group ONE.
(photo courtesy of Annenberg Radio News)

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced Tuesday morning that Los Angeles is partnering with anti-poverty advocacy group ONE to generate awareness of disease and scant health care access in Africa as well as homelessness and the spread of HIV locally.

Flanked by Councilman Tom LeBonge, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., members of sister nonprofits, and a host of ONE representatives and student activists at the south steps of City Hall, Villaraigosa stressed that the political will to enact large-scale change begins with each Angeleno.

"This is a day when Angelenos come together as one to raise awareness on the issues of preventable disease and access to health care," Villaraigosa said.

The disease and healthcare tenets of ONE's campaign were touched on by everyone who took the podium, with much attention on Africa, the continent where the nonprofit co-founded by U2 frontman Bono focuses most of its policy reform and lobbying efforts.

Stefani Morones, one of two Loyola Marymount students at the event who started a chapter of ONE on campus last fall, pointed out that while we pay $2 for a single gallon of gas, 1 billion people in Africa live on just $1 a day.

Waters noted that much of Africa is mired in poverty because of massive debt that nations are only beginning to correct in order to rebuild infrastructure. About 100 million children are not able to attend school of any kind and access to health care is sporadic at best. Still, she was also quick to point out that 18 percent of children living under the age of 18 right here in the United States are living in poverty. More than 14 percent of the total Los Angeles population fall below the federal poverty line, Waters said, which is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as an annual income of less than $11,200 for a single person under the age of 65.

While taking questions after the event, Villaraigosa spoke of America's "obligation to the developed world" but echoed Waters' emphasis on problems  in Los Angeles.

"The idea that poverty is just in the far reaches of the world is one we have to dispel," he said before citing his 2007 initiative to test one million Angelenos for HIV by 2011 and efforts by his administration to make affordable housing available for Skid Row residents.

But with regards to the ONE partnership, Villaraigosa did not offer any specific, on-the-ground agenda for change when pressed.

"We want Antonio Villaraigosa to look in his own backyard at his own health and housing policies and how he interacts with private developers like USC so he can innovate ways to really center-stage the most marginalized of Angelenos," said Shawn Sebastian, a development associate at the Esperanza Community Housing Corp., which serves the "working poor" residents of South Central Los Angeles, in a phone interview.

Sebastian said it does no good to say those who are working for menial wages to live 12 to a mold-infested studio with lead-based paint and cockroaches are better off than those in Africa living on less than $1 a day because poverty is "a contextual series of systemic deprivations."

"We definitely support any initiative, but our people are specifically impoverished due to local policies, not global ones," Sebastian continued.

"Villaraigosa has the power to make significant changes to housing and health policy at the city level to help hundreds of thousands of Los Angelenos right now."

All who attended the press conference, however, were championing the "advocacy leads to action" mantra of ONE.

The goals of increasing American foreign aid to impoverished countries and raising awareness of global poverty require both a grassroots and top-down approach, according to Matt Higginson, a ONE representative who made the initial contact with the mayor's office.

ONEs primary method "is to get voters to lobby their local and state representatives for legislation we sponsor," Higginson said. This begins with a strong volunteer base, and adding Los Angeles to its list of partner cities only helps to increase the organization's 2.5 million-strong volunteer base.

Jane Oliva Paik, the second of the two Loyola Marymount students present at the conference, supported this idea as the first, necessary step.

"Like all great social movements, it starts by developing political will," she said.