Poor People United Holds Talk by Welfare Rights Leader

Poor People United (PPU) hosted a talk by Willie Baptist and Mary Bricker- Jenkins of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU) last Friday evening. The event, at 152 Baden Street, was the result of weeks of outreach work and planning by PPU. To visually reinforce themes of the talk, clotheslines were stretched across the gym holding dozens of T-shirts covered with handwritten stories of American poverty.

Willie Baptist is the educational director of KWRU, a multiracial organization of poor and homeless families from north Philadelphia that has spearheaded the national Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign. Baptist noted the new class of poor people emerging in Rochester as the result of thousands of recent layoffs. “Not even a college degree will make you safe from the growing crisis of poverty”. He continued to stress the importance of building leaders that can be the foundation of a movement to end poverty.

Mary Bricker-Jenkins a Temple University social work professor with KWRU, explained the history of the welfare state. “The welfare system was never intended to meet the needs of all the people, but even that is being dismantled”. She pointed out that today we are living in a system that can produce more than enough for everyone to have their basic needs met, and yet the number of people entering into poverty is growing.

Baptist and Bricker-Jenkins then screened a short documentary about a the New Freedom Bus Tour. One of the goals of this tour was to document economic human rights violations in cities and towns across America. This documentation was then presented to the United Nations. These basic rights are spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; among them are the right to affordable housing, living wages, healthcare, food, shelter and clothing.

The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign is calling for further documentation of poverty to present to the UN August 30th in New York City. The group plans to erect a tent city and to organize a ‘March for Our Lives” outside the Republican National Convention.

For more information see http://MarchForOurLives.org, http://KWRU.org.