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Fight to Win
Paperback
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- Book Synopsis
- AJ Withers draws on their own experiences as an organizer, extensive interviews with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) activists and Toronto bureaucrats, and freedom of information requests to provide a detailed account of the work of OCAP. This book shows that poor people's organizing can be effective even in periods of neoliberal retrenchment. Fight to Win tells the stories of four key 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 overarching, but inadequate, 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 **x2014; direct-action casework coupled with mass mobilization **x2014; for both immediate need and long-term change. These campaigns demonstrate the validity of OCAP's longstanding critiques of dominant homelessness policies and practices. Each campaign was fully or partially successful: these victories were 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 Fight to Win: Inside Poor People's Organizing, A Violent History of Benevolence: Interlocking Oppression in the Moral Economies of Social Working (with Chris Chapman) and numerous other articles and book chapters. They are the Ruth Wynn Woodward Jr. Chair in Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University.
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9781773634814
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Fernwood, (14 March 2022)
- Number of Pages
- 256
- Weight
- 422 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 153 x 230 x 18 mm
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