Fight To Win: Inside Poor People’s Organizing

Author: A. J. Withers

Publisher: Fernwood Publishing

Fight to Win tells the stories of four key Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) homelessness campaigns: stopping the criminalization of homeless people in a public park; the fight for poor people’s access to the Housing Shelter Fund; a campaign to improve the emergency shelter system and the City’s Housing First policy; and the attempt by the City of Toronto to drive homeless people from encampments during the COVID pandemic.

This book shows how power works at the municipal level, including the use of a multitude of demobilization tactics, devaluing poor people as sources of knowledge about their own lives, and gaslighting poor people and anti-poverty activists. AJ Withers also details OCAP’s dual activist strategy: direct-action casework coupled with mass mobilization for both immediate need and long-term change. These campaigns exemplify OCAP’s longstanding critiques of homelessness policies and practices. Each campaign’s victory was secured by anti-poverty activists through the use of, and the threat of, direct disruptive action tactics.

A. J. Withers organized with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty for over 20 years, including as a paid organizer. They are the author of A Violent History of Benevolence: Interlocking Oppression in the Moral Economies of Social Working (with Chris Chapman) and Disability Politics and Theory and numerous other articles and book chapters. A. J. recently completed a PhD in social work at York University.