Poor People's Campaign

FAQs

  • The Mass Poor People’s Assembly & Moral March on Washington is going digital! We will hold the largest on-line gathering of poor and impacted people, and people of conscience, in this nation’s history. The COVID-19 global pandemic is exposing the already existing crisis of poverty in America, and the 140 million poor and low-income people across this nation will be heard!
  • This moment is forcing everybody to adjust, in small and big ways. Even now, the ground beneath our feet is shifting. But our strategy for building a long-term moral fusion movement has not changed. In the time ahead, we will continue to organize to shift the moral narrative, impact policies and elections, and build lasting power. We are prepared to organize at this critical moment because of our strategy and the vision and genius of our many communities.
  • The Campaign’s demands were released in April 2018 in the Moral Agenda and Declaration of Fundamental Rights. From voting rights, workers’ rights, welfare, health care, housing, education, indigenous sovereignty, disability rights, water and sanitation and peace, these demands present a comprehensive, transformative political and moral agenda for this nation. 
  • This is not the time for trickle-down solutions. When you lift from the bottom, everybody rises. There are concrete solutions to the immediate crisis posed by COVID-19 and the longer term illnesses we have been battling. We have immediate demands to address the coronavirus – please sign the demands petition and share it widely. But in the long run, they will only make a real and lasting change if our full agenda is met. 
  • Through this deeply uncertain time, we cannot return to “normal”. There has never been a normal for the 140 million poor and low-wealth people who live in health and economic emergencies every day.
  • Addressing the depth of the crises that have been revealed in this pandemic means enacting the agenda of the Poor People’s Campaign. It means ensuring that our abundant resources are used for the general welfare, instead of for the wealthy and war. It means everybody in and nobody out!
  • We know the poor and dispossessed of this country must organize if we are ever going to end racism and poverty and save the planet from climate change and war. 
  • The question isn’t how much it costs to address these moral issues, but what it costs us not to.
  • On June 20, 2020, we rise to speak truth, to challenge the distorted moral narrative, and to call this nation to the ethic of love and justice. We demand action.
  • We are shifting the narrative by changing the narrators – and pushing out our stories and our solutions. 
  • On June 20, 2020, the digital stage is being built for the plight, fight and insight of poor, dispossessed and impacted people, joined by moral leaders, advocates and artists, to present to the nation and the world the outrage of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism. The program will include the stories, solutions and songs of movement leaders and artists. 
  • Participants will receive information on how to go back to our communities to take action together and continue building power among the poor and dispossessed for November’s election and beyond.
  • The current public health crisis reminds us that we cannot allow another election cycle to pass us by without poverty and its interlocking injustices at the center of the political discourse.
  • June 20, 2020 falls after the primaries and before the two major political party conventions – a time when thousands of people united and organized can impact the platform of the 2020 Presidential Campaigns going forward. 
  • The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is claiming the third weekend in June, the time of the summer solstice. The unfolding emergency caused by COVID-19 will pose unprecedented challenges in the time ahead. During this critical moment, deepened by the failures of our elected leaders and the threat of economic collapse, a fusion movement must rise as light out of the dark.
  • The Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington is being organized, energized and driven primarily by poor and directly impacted people through the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. 
  • Each state coordinating committee of the Poor People’s Campaign is made up of people who are directly impacted by racism, poverty, militarism and ecological devastation, moral and faith leaders, advocates and organizers. These leaders represent hundreds of local, statewide, and national organizations. 
  • The Poor People’s Campaign is anchored by two organizations, Repairers of the Breach and the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice and made up of over forty state coordinating committees and hundreds of national partners including faith bodies, labor unions, civil and human rights organizations, environmental justice, fraternal organization and others.
  • As our demands show, we are militantly non-partisan, and yet very political. We believe both political parties have failed to center systemic racism, poverty, the war economy and militarism, ecological devastation and religious nationalism as the moral issues of our day. 
  • We are recruiting and registering people for a movement that votes because we know that a shift in voter participation of poor and low-income people can fundamentally shift the electoral landscape in this country. Not just for a party or a single election, but for a generation.
  • June 20, 2020 can only be the generationally-transformative day if people like you join us by organizing in your community, organizations, congregations, unions, neighborhoods and families. Change comes when we build power together! 
  • The struggles of poor, dispossessed and impacted people across the country are coming together to demand an agenda that uplifts us all. From Oak Flat in Arizona where the Apache Stronghold is fighting to preserve sacred ground from a copper mining giant, to Mississippi, where immigrants are fighting to protect their families and activists are exposing inhumane conditions in prisons, to North Carolina, where we continue to defend the sacred right to vote, our communities will be the cornerstone of the new country we are building together.