Jefferson Award Winner: Kris Crawford
November 2008

In 1972, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, U.S. Senator Robert Taft, Jr. and Sam Beard founded the American Institute for Public Service to establish a Nobel Prize for public and community service - The Jefferson Awards.  The Jefferson Awards are a prestigious national recognition system honoring community and public service in America and are presented on two levels: national and local.  On the local level, Jefferson Awards recipients are ordinary people who do extraordinary things for the benefit of many. Something that Kris Crawford aka Kristine Crawford has been doing for a decade.

The idea behind the Jefferson Awards is very simple - That One Person Can Make a Difference!

Animal Advocate Knocks Out Dog Fighting
CBS5

Using three pit bulls and a slide show, Kris Crawford is ready with another presentation for young people. "I'm here to show you what I do with the dogs," she tells more than a hundred teenaged inmates gathered in the gym at Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall.

"Dog fighting is for losers and it's not a sign of strength and power or greatness," she tells us.

Kris recruits top break dancers and mixed martial arts athletes to reinforce her program, "Knock Out Dog Fighting." Josh "The Punk" Thomson, once locked up at this same facility, is now a lightweight champion. "Fighters... We do this willingly," Josh explains "Dogs....They don't. For owners to push their dogs onto this type of scene is inhumane."

Because Kris knows these kids are at-risk for taking up dog-fighting, she's hear to show them better choices.

Kris originally trained her three pit bulls to save lives for search and rescue missions. She founded her non profit For Pits' Sake in 1997. "I was at a crossroads in life where I was trying to decide how to make my life of value," she remembers. "I realized I could give back by training my dogs to save lives."

Kris and her four-legged partners have been dispatched to some of California's most high profile missing persons cases, and became one of the busiest search teams in the state. In six years, she and her dogs have helped in more than two hundred search and rescue missions. Kris and her pit bull Dakota were chosen to search for the remains of the astronauts in the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster.

Kris says, "It was a great honor because here's a pit bull, a breed being banned all over the country, that was handpicked to search for American heroes."

Kris had to stop doing search and rescue after crushing her hand in an accident a few years ago. Now, she and her pit bulls focus on discouraging dog fighting, teaching dog bite prevention classes at schools, and offering therapy for abused and disabled children.

"My dogs can teach a disabled child how to momentarily forget about their disability or they can teach a battered or abused kid to love again," Kris says, fondly petting Dakota.

Now she looks back with pride at her dogged determination to make a difference.

"When I used to do tracking and all those things, when you did a good job you get a trophy or ribbon to put on the wall. Now my walls are completely empty but when I do a good job, we could save somebody's life."

So for more than a decade of work using pit bulls for search and rescue, safety lessons and therapy work for disadvantaged children, the Jefferson Award in the Bay Area goes to Kris Crawford.