For more than 20 years, A.J. With­ers was active with one of Ontario’s best known grass­roots groups, the Ontario Coali­tion Against Poverty (OCAP). Recent­ly, With­ers released a new book telling sto­ries of and draw­ing lessons from four of OCAP’s key cam­paigns over the years relat­ed to home­less­ness. Scott Neigh inter­views them about OCAP and about Fight to Win: Inside Poor People’s Orga­niz­ing (Fer­n­wood Pub­lish­ing, 2021). 

With­ers has been involved in grass­roots polit­i­cal work since the late 1990s, ini­tial­ly envi­ron­men­tal­ism and then in the glob­al jus­tice move­ment, which in those years brought large direct-action protests to the sum­mits of oppres­sive inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tions. Even in that moment, With­ers was con­scious of some of the weak­ness­es of the glob­al jus­tice move­ment that were soon to become wide­ly dis­cussed, and was look­ing for oth­er ways to fight for trans­for­ma­tive change. Not long after, they found a polit­i­cal home in OCAP, an anti-cap­i­tal­ist direct action anti-pover­ty orga­ni­za­tion. Since 1990, OCAP has com­bined mil­i­tant mass mobi­liza­tion in sup­port of demands around things like rais­ing social assis­tance rates and hous­ing for all, with the use of direct action to win con­crete gains for indi­vid­ual peo­ple liv­ing in pover­ty. With­ers was active in OCAP for the next two decades. 

In the last decade, With­ers has also engaged in polit­i­cal writ­ing. Their work includes an acces­si­ble intro­duc­tion to rad­i­cal dis­abil­i­ty the­o­ry and co-author­ing a crit­i­cal his­to­ry of the pol­i­tics of social work.

Fight to Win is With­ers’ most recent book. They had a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent moti­va­tions for writ­ing it. One is that, as an expe­ri­enced orga­niz­er, for a long time they had been quite dis­sat­is­fied with most writ­ing about orga­niz­ing com­ing out of con­tem­po­rary move­ments. This was large­ly because such writ­ing often tries to do two things that pull it in very dif­fer­ent direc­tions – it tries to describe and per­haps ana­lyze the orga­niz­ing work, which requires a will­ing­ness to talk about mis­takes and prob­lems, but it also tries to gen­er­ate enthu­si­asm and draw peo­ple into the move­ment in gen­er­al or spe­cif­ic orga­ni­za­tions, which encour­ages a more cel­e­bra­to­ry ori­en­ta­tion. Accord­ing to With­ers, this means that authors ​“there­fore are often describ­ing the groups that they want to be in as much as the groups that they’re in, if not more so.” As well, With­ers has seen lots of groups in lots of places over the last twen­ty years attempt to mod­el them­selves on OCAP, but many of them have foundered because of the ways in which they have drawn lessons from the Toron­to-based group – far too many have applied the mod­el as a ​“cook­ie cut­ter, when the beau­ty of OCAP his­tor­i­cal­ly has been its abil­i­ty to respond to the com­mu­ni­ty that it’s in.” 

In Fight to Win, With­ers attempts to look at OCAP’s work in a more nuanced way to ​“actu­al­ly give mean­ing­ful lessons about orga­niz­ing” that will be use­ful both to expe­ri­enced orga­niz­ers look­ing to apply them in oth­er con­texts and also to peo­ple new­er to grass­roots politics. 

The book starts out by exam­in­ing a short but high­ly suc­cess­ful fight in 2017 in oppo­si­tion to a neigh­bour­hood busi­ness improve­ment area in Toron­to that was employ­ing a pri­vate secu­ri­ty guard to harass home­less peo­ple in the local park. Anoth­er chap­ter looks at an emer­gency hous­ing ben­e­fit meant to pre­vent home­less­ness, that was dis­crim­i­nat­ing against dis­abled peo­ple and fam­i­lies. The group large­ly approached that strug­gle through its direct action case­work, and expe­ri­enced a mix of suc­cess and fail­ure. Anoth­er chap­ter focus­es on OCAP’s many cam­paigns relat­ed to push­ing for improve­ments in the city’s emer­gency shel­ter sys­tem, with par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the many dif­fer­ent strate­gies employed by the city to demo­bi­lize the strug­gle. And the book con­cludes with a look at encamp­ment orga­niz­ing in the con­text of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Along the way, the book takes up many impor­tant ideas. For instance, it crit­i­cal­ly exam­ines the ​“hous­ing first” pol­i­cy, tout­ed by pro­gres­sives and imple­ment­ed in many places across Cana­da, and the ways in which its real-world impacts are ​“actu­al­ly pret­ty ter­ri­ble.” The book also looks at the direct action case­work tac­tic in some detail. And it cov­ers the cru­cial role of ​“epis­temic vio­lence” – that is, how deeply cen­tral the denial of the expe­ri­ences and knowl­edge of poor peo­ple and grass­roots orga­niz­ers is to efforts to main­tain the bru­tal sys­temic vio­lence to which poor peo­ple are con­stant­ly subjected. 

Though it is a book packed with ideas and the­o­ry, With­ers said, ​“it express­es that the­o­ry real­ly acces­si­bly. I work to tell sto­ries of orga­niz­ing in a day-to-day way that cap­tures the real­i­ties of orga­niz­ing.” Its aim, they said, is to be ​“a use­ful tool for any­one that’s doing any kind of com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­ing, or any work on home­less­ness and hous­ing” – to be a tool through which ​“folks can think through orga­niz­ing, and also home­less­ness pol­i­cy” in their own con­crete cir­cum­stances and ​“real­ly push the strug­gle forward.”