الكفاح من أجل الفوز .. داخل تنظيم الفقراء

AJ Withers' book draws on his personal experience as an organizer, extensive interviews with Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) activists and Toronto officials, as well as requests for information, to provide a detailed account of the coalition's work. This book shows that organizing the poor can be effective even in periods of neoliberal austerity. “Fighting to Win” tells the stories of four major OCAP campaigns to combat homelessness: stopping the criminalization of homeless people in a public park; The struggle for the poor to obtain housing and shelter funds; a campaign to improve the city's comprehensive, but inadequate, emergency shelter system and "Housing First" policy; And the city of Toronto's attempt to evict homeless people from camps during the Covid pandemic. This book shows how power is exercised at the municipal level, including the use of many methods of disempowerment, belittling the poor as a source of knowledge about their lives, and misleading them and anti-poverty activists. AJ Withers also details OCAP's dual activism strategy – direct casework combined with mass mobilization – to address immediate needs and create long-term change. These campaigns validate OCAP's long-standing criticisms of mainstream homelessness policies and practices. Each campaign has been a total or partial success: these victories have been achieved by anti-poverty activists through the use and threat of subversive direct action.