Alyssa Milano

In the late 1980s, Milano contacted Ryan White, a schoolboy ostracized for having AIDS, and a fan of hers. She attended a big party for him where she sat with him for six hours making friendship bracelets. They appeared together on The Phil Donahue Show, where Milano kissed White, in order to show that she could not catch the disease through casual contact with him.

In October 2004, Milano participated in UNICEF’s “Trick or Treat” campaign as the national spokesperson. She raised approximately US$50,000 for South African women and children with AIDS by selling her own and schools’ photo work.

In support of PETA, she appeared in a 2007 advertisement for them, advocating vegetarianism, in a dress made entirely of vegetables.

In June 2007, The Sabin Vaccine Institute, named Milano a Founding Ambassador for the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases, an alliance formed to advocate and mobilize resources in the fight to control neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), to which Milano donated US$250,000. She is also a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for the United States of America, Her field work for the organization has included a 2004 trip to Angola to speak with HIV-positive women and people disfigured by land mines during the country’s civil war; a trip to India to meet displaced mothers living in squalor following the 2004 tsunami; and a 2010 trip to the settlement of Kolonia in western Kosovo to witness impoverished living conditions. Milano wrote on her blog that the latter trip was “the hardest experience I’ve had on a field visit”, and described a waste dump close to the settlement where children spent time looking for metal to sell or scavenging for food.

For her 37th birthday, which occurred on December 19, 2009, Milano ran an online fundraising campaign for Charity: Water. Her original goal was to raise US$25,000, but a donation from her husband put her over the US$75,000 mark on December 18. The fundraiser ran until December 26. In September 2013, Milano released a viral tape on Funny or Die that drew attention to the Syrian civil war.

In 2015, Milano endorsed Bernie Sanders for President of the United States. In 2016 after the Democratic Party presidential primaries, she expressed her support for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. She was also involved in get-out-the-vote efforts for Rob Quist.

On October 15, 2017, Milano posted the message which re-launched what is known as the #MeToo movement, which was started in 2006 by Tarana Burke. According to Milano, a friend suggested that she post a message on her Twitter account encouraging survivors of sexual harassment and assault to post #metoo as a status update. This was to gauge the widespread problem of sexual misconduct. She was inspired to bring awareness to the commonality of sex crimes among women in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s expulsion from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for alleged sex crimes against women in the film industry. Milano emphasized that the basis of her hashtag was to create a platform where women had an “opportunity without having to go into detail about their stories if they did not want to”.

Since 2004, Milano has canvassed for national, state, and local candidates.

Milano phone banked with Piper Perabo and drove people to the polls for the United States Senate special election in Alabama, 2017 on December 12, 2017, to vote for Democratic candidate Doug Jones.

Milano, with actor Christopher Gorham, drove voters to the polls during early voting and on March 27, 2017, for Georgia’s 6th congressional district 2017 special election for Jon Ossoff, and she later posted photos of herself with the voters on Instagram. Milano and Gorham had been in the area for the pilot of Insatiable.

In 2018, she was announced as a co-chair of the Health Care Voter campaign. She released an op-ed to Time magazine on why health care will decide her vote in 2018.

Milano helped raise money for Richard Dien Winfield, a Democrat in Georgia’s 2018 10th congressional district race.

Milano, who spoke at the 2018 Women’s March, refused to participate in 2019, citing the failure of 2019 Women’s March leaders Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour to condemn the homophobia, antisemitism, and transphobia of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. 

In May 2019, Milano advocated celibacy in the form of a sex strike in retaliation of a recently passed abortion law in the U.S. state of Georgia. 

In March 2020, Milano endorsed former US vice president Joe Biden for President of the United States. She has declined to withdraw her endorsement of Biden despite sexual assault allegations against him. On April 27, Milano tweeted that she was “aware of the new developments in Tara Reade’s accusation against Joe Biden. I want Tara, like every other survivor, to have the space to be heard and seen without being used as fodder. I hear and see you, Tara.”^[100] This was after criticism of Milano’s support for Biden where she appeared to backtrack on her previous stance for believing women. On April 28, in an op-ed for Deadline Milano reiterated her support for Biden and considered “Believing women was never about ‘Believe all women no matter what they say,’ it was about changing the culture of NOT believing women by default.”