Fight to Win

- Blurb -

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.