Fight to Win - by Withers (Paperback)

About the Book

The first full length book on the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, one of Canada's most significant poor people's activist organizations.

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

AJ Withers has been an OCAP activist for twenty years, is a former paid organizer and is currently a member of the Executive Committee. They are the author of Disability Politics and Theory and co-author (with Chris Chapman) of A Violent History of Benevolence: Interlocking Oppression and the Moral Economies of Social Working, as well as numerous other chapters and articles. AJ recently completed a PhD in social work at York University.