Fight To Win: Inside Poor People’s Organizing
Fight To Win: Inside Poor People's Organizing
Cover of “Fight to Win: Inside Poor People’s Organizing”, 2022 Heritage Toronto Book Award Nominee.
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.
About the Author:
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.