Latest news with #anti-poverty
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
How to fight back against Trump? Look to poor people's movements
For tens of millions of people, Donald Trump's 'big, beautiful bill' is a grotesque nightmare. The proposed legislative cuts, including historic attacks on Medicaid and Snap, come at a time when 60% of Americans already cannot make ends meet. As justification, Maga Republicans are once again invoking the shibboleth of work requirements to demean and discredit the poor, even as they funnel billions of dollars into the war economy and lavish the wealthy with tax cuts. As anti-poverty organizers, we've often used the slogan: 'They say cut back, we say fight back.' It's a catchy turn of phrase, but it reveals that for too long we've been on the back foot. In the world's richest country, in which mass poverty exists beside unprecedented plenty, we're tired of just fending off the worst attacks. Too much ground is lost when our biggest wins are simply not losing past gains. Amid Trump's cruelty and avarice, it's time to fight for a new social contract – one that lifts from the bottom of society so that everybody rises. There are no shortcuts to building the kind of popular power necessary for us to shift from defense to offense. The task is a generational one, requiring even greater discipline, sacrifice, perseverance and patience. But as we consider the best way forward, the past offers clues. In our new book, You Only Get What You're Organized to Take: Lessons From the Movement to End Poverty, we document insights from some of this country's most significant poor people's movements. As nascent fascism continues to metastasize, these largely untold stories contain some of the very solutions we need to prevent democratic decline and overcome bigotry, political violence, Christian nationalism and economic immiseration. Today, the historic demands of the poor – for safety, belonging, peace, equality, and justice – are rapidly becoming the demands of humanity. The hard-fought wisdom of the organized poor has much to teach all of us. We're reminded of the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, especially the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Largely forgotten to history, NWRO was once the biggest poor people's organization in the country. The organization, led by poor Black women, regularly staged mass marches and demonstrations and held picket lines and sit-ins at welfare offices, at a time when the poor were subject to racist, exclusionary and moralizing policies. At its height, the organization had over 100 local chapters, a sophisticated operation that offered a political and spiritual home to over 20,000 dues-paying members. In 1971 in Nevada, where the governor was cutting the social safety net, the local NWRO chapter organized 1,000 women to storm Caesars Palace, the luxury hotel and casino, and shut down the main drag in Las Vegas. The protest turned into a muti-year campaign of civil disobedience and a federal judge eventually reinstated the benefits. These women were unapologetically militant and willing to take big risks. They were also clear that forging power required the less visible spadework of movement-building – including looking after one another through networks of solidarity and collective care. At the same time as the Black Panthers were feeding tens of thousands of children through the Free Breakfast Program (and provocatively asking why the government couldn't do the same, even as it spent billions of dollars slaughtering the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), NWRO created its own innovative 'projects of survival'. The historian Annelise Orleck writes that in Las Vegas, the 'welfare moms applied for and won federal grants to open and run … the first health clinic in the largely Black, and thoroughly poor Westside of Las Vegas. Then came the neighborhood's first library, public swimming pool, senior citizen housing project, solarization program, crime prevention program, and community newspaper, all organized and staffed by poor mothers and later their young adult children.' As the experience in Las Vegas revealed, the women of NWRO were organizers, caretakers and strategists of the highest order. They were also anti-racists and feminists of an entirely new mold. At a time when many women were fighting for equality within the workplace, NWRO championed 'welfare as a right', challenging the notion that the value of a human is tied to their ability to work within the marketplace and raising fundamental questions about how a society cares for its people. This idea coalesced into their demand for a 'guaranteed adequate income', an early precursor to the expanded child tax credit in 2021. Before this pandemic-era program was abandoned by both reactionary Republicans and recalcitrant Democrats, it lifted four million children above the poverty line, the single largest decrease in official child poverty in American history. In a legendary article for the 1972 spring issue of Ms Magazine, Johnnie Tillmon, the first chairperson of NWRO and later its executive director, wrote: 'For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women's Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare, it's a matter of survival … As far as I'm concerned, the ladies of NWRO are the frontline troops of women's freedom. Both because we have so few illusions and because our issues are so important to all women–the right to a living wage for women's work, the right to life itself.' Veterans of the welfare rights movement named their model of grassroots organizing after Tillmon. In 'the Johnnie Tillmon model', poor women, and poor people more broadly, are not simply an oppressed identity group but a latent social force with potentially vast power. Because they have the least invested in the status quo and the most to gain from big change, they are strategically positioned to rise up and rally not just their own communities, but the millions more who are one paycheck, healthcare crisis, job loss, debt collection or eviction away from poverty. In order to harness this transformational power, the Johnnie Tillmon model proposes four strategic principles, as relevant today as they were in the 1960s and 1970s: The poor must unite across their differences and assume strong leadership within grassroots movements. These movements must operate as a politically and financially independent force in our public life. The leaders of these movements must attend to the daily needs and aspirations of their communities by building visionary projects of survival. These projects of survival must serve as bases of operation for broader organizing, political education, and leadership development. The women of NWRO believed there was unrecognized ingenuity and untapped brilliance within their communities. Even before the organization existed, the tens of thousands of women who made up its membership were already leaders in countless ways: they knew how to pool their meager resources, feed one another, navigate treacherous government bureaucracy and protect themselves from brutal state-sanctioned violence. When such survival skills were collectivized, networked, and politicized, these women became a force to be reckoned with. The same could be true today. As the Trump administration intensifies its attacks on life-saving programs like Medicaid and Snap, poor and dispossessed people will not passively swallow their suffering. Already, in states as far flung as Vermont and Alaska, Michigan and North Carolina, we're seeing an upsurge of resistance among Medicaid recipients. But we cannot be satisfied simply with righteous acts of protest and mass mobilization. The question is how to transform our growing indignation into lasting and visionary power. The Johnnie Tillmon model is a good place to start. The Rev Dr Liz Theoharis is the director of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign and co-founder of the Freedom Church of the Poor. Noam Sandweiss-Back is the director of partnerships at the Kairos Center. They are co-authors of You Only Get What You're Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty (Beacon, 2025)
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
State sues SDC, claiming the anti-poverty agency has not paid nearly $360K in wages, benefits
The state Department of Workforce Development is suing the Social Development Commission, claiming the anti-poverty organization has failed to pay its employees nearly $360,000 in wages and benefits. The civil lawsuit filed May 23 in Milwaukee County Circuit Court seeks twice that amount, the second half "as penalty for the defendant's wrongful withholding of the wages," according to a five-page complaint. The agency's attorney, William Sulton, told the Journal Sentinel that SDC was aware of the outstanding payments owned to employees, but did not believe the $359,609 figure was correct. He also accused the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families of refusing to provide the reimbursement SDC needs to pay its employees. "We think that's wrong and beyond unfortunate, but that is the reason why employees have not been paid," he said. Sulton said he would be filing a third-party complaint against the Department of Children and Families "asking them to make the payments they committed to." The lawsuit is the latest blow to the anti-poverty agency, which once had a $30 million operating budget to support dozens of programs. The lawsuit was first reported by Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. SDC has been under scrutiny since its misallocation of more than $100,000 in state funds surfaced last year. The agency abruptly shut down in April 2024 but reopened in December to offer four programs. In early May, the Department of Children and Families announced it was terminating the organization's status as a community action agency, the Journal Sentinel reported. Without the designation, the agency will lose access to millions of federal Community Services Block Grant funds, effective July 3. Gina Castro of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this story. Alison Dirr can be reached at adirr@ This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: State files lawsuit accusing SDC of failing to pay wages and benefits
New York Times
22-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Millions Could Lose Food Stamp Benefits Under Republican Bill, Analysis Finds
Millions of low-income Americans could lose access to food stamps or see reductions in their monthly benefits as a result of House Republicans' newly adopted tax bill, according to an analysis released Thursday from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The findings underscore the significant trade-offs in the party's signature legislative package, which seeks to save money by cutting federal anti-poverty programs in a move that may leave some of the poorest Americans in worse financial shape. To save nearly $300 billion over the next decade, Republicans proposed a series of new rules that would tighten eligibility under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Under their bill, a wider range of aid recipients would be required to obtain work to qualify for federal help. Republicans say the change aims to reduce waste and ensure that the federal government provides food stamps only to the truly needy. They have similarly looked to expand work requirements to Medicaid, which provides health insurance to low-income Americans. Still, the work mandate could reduce participation in SNAP by more than three million people in an average month over the next decade, according to the budget office, which studied a version of the party's recently approved legislative package. Republicans also proposed to have states assume some of the costs for the federal food stamp program, an idea that has troubled some governors, who say their budgets cannot afford to shoulder the responsibility. As a result, congressional budget scorekeepers estimated the shift could result in an average of 1.3 million people losing access to SNAP. They attributed the reduction to the fact that some states may opt to 'modify benefits or eligibility or possibly leave the program altogether because of the increased costs.' Issuing its analysis, the budget office cautioned it could not produce one total, concise estimate of the number of people who could lose anti-hunger aid, given the possibility of overlap and the potential interactions with changes to other federal programs. Still, the budget office estimated that many of Republicans' proposed changes would reduce eligibility while cutting benefit amounts for those who do remain on the program. A small percentage of households could even see a roughly $100 reduction in their monthly allowance because of a provision that would change how some benefits are computed, according to the analysis.
BBC News
15-05-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Anti-poverty strategy: Stormont to sign off plan after 18 years
Stormont ministers are expected to agree the Northern Ireland Executive's first-ever draft strategy to tackle poverty later on Thursday, BBC News NI March, Stormont's Executive Committee was found in breach of its legal obligation to adopt the strategy by a court anti-poverty strategy was first committed to 18 years ago with the aim of reducing social exclusion and Minister Gordon Lyons submitted a draft paper to ministers for consideration about six weeks ago. The minister previously described the document as a "realistic" but long-term plan to tackle must be signed off by ministers before it can go out for public will then return to the executive for any final changes to be considered before Stormont departments can begin to implement figures from the Department for Communities (DfC) suggest about 22% of children in Northern Ireland are growing up in figures also indicate that about 23% of children are in relative poverty and about 20% are in absolute poverty. What is the Stormont anti-poverty strategy? The anti-poverty strategy is a requirement inserted into the Northern Ireland Act, following the St Andrews Agreement in have been multiple court orders and legal challenges made as no strategy has ever been implemented in Northern January, judgment was reserved in a recent legal challenge brought against Stormont for "failing to adopt" an anti-poverty strategy for Northern months later at the High Court in Belfast, Stormont's Executive Committee was found in breach of its legal obligation to adopt a strategy. How is poverty measured? There are two main measurements of low income used by the government, absolute poverty and relative poverty. Income is counted as the money a household has to spend after housing costs are taken into poverty measures how many people this year cannot afford a set standard of living. The Department for Work and Pensions at Westminster currently defines it based on the living standard an average income could buy in the year ending in March 2011. If your income is 40% below this, after adjusting for rising prices since then, you are classed as living in absolute poverty is the number of people whose income is 40% below the average income individual is considered to be in relative poverty if they are living in a household with an income below 60% of the typical UK is a measure of whether those in the lowest income households are keeping pace with the growth of incomes in the population as a whole.
