Poor People’s Campaign
In 2017, Repairers of the Breach co-launched the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. We provide leadership to the campaign, including support to over 30 state coordinating committees.
Repairers of the Breach is co-anchor of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Our work draws on the unfinished work of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, under the leadership of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the National Welfare Rights Organization, worker’s rights movements, women’s rights movements, religious leaders, and people of all races who launched the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968 and called for a “revolution of values.” Today’s Poor People’s Campaign is a growing national movement organized to challenge the interlocking issues of systemic racism, systemic poverty, the war economy, denial of healthcare, ecological devastation, and the distorted false moral narrative of religious nationalism.
Over the past few decades, we have witnessed the scaling back of anti-poverty programs, the lack of wage increases, the suppression of voting rights, and the increased incarceration of Black and brown communities. These are only some of the causes of the growing inequality in our nation. There are over 135 million poor and low-income people in the U.S. This includes almost 39 million children, nearly 59.7% of Black people (23.7 million), 64% of Latinx people (38 million), 59% of indigenous people (2.14 million), and 33.5% of white people (65 million poor white people). Still, economic justice issues have remained on the fringes of our nation’s public and political discourse for decades.
Today, Repairers of the Breach provides leadership, organizing, policy, strategy, media, cultural arts, and partnerships support to the Campaign. Our organizers support over 30 state coordinating committees, building networks across state lines, providing training on movement-building skills, supporting existing local organizing, and collaborating with local partners to mobilize towards the Campaign’s goals. The goals of the Poor People’s Campaign are to:
- Shift the narrative by reframing the causes of systemic poverty and providing new data on poverty and its effects,
- Build a powerful and diverse movement of people that can dismantle unjust systems and achieve lasting social change through social and political action, and
- Implement a Third Reconstruction Agenda that fully addresses the needs of poor and low-wealth people.
To learn more about the campaign visit the campaign website: www.poorpeoplescampaign.org
Read our timeline of the Poor People’s Campaign blog post by clicking here.
