AJ
Withers draws on their own experiences as an organizer, extensive
interviews with OCAP activists and Toronto bureaucrats, and freedom
of information requests to provide a detailed account of the work of
the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (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 three 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; and a campaign to improve the emergency shelter
system and the City's overarching, but inadequate, Housing First
policy.
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 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.