The Next 500 Days: Together We Grow a New, Unsettling, Unstoppable Force

WILPF US has been supporting the Poor People’s Campaign from the beginning. On December 11, 2019, several WILPF members marched in San Francisco as part of the PPC’s nine-month “We Must Do M.O.R.E.” national tour. Among them were Peninsula/Palo Alto branch member Cherrill S. (left), with Jackie Cabasso of Western States Legal Foundation and Betty T. of San Francisco WILPF.

By Dorothy Van Soest
WILPF Liaison to the Poor People’s Campaign
Member, WILPF Women, Money & Democracy Committee

May 2021

We shall have to learn to use moral energy to put a new sort of force into the world and believe that it is a vital thing - the only thing, in this moment of sorrow and death and destruction that will heal the world. — Jane Addams, Zurich, 1919

Jane Addams’s call at the second Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom Congress, during a time when another epidemic was spreading its misery across the globe, is echoed today in WILPF’s committed partnership with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Since its inception three years ago, the Poor Peoples Campaign has been building a “new sort of force” in a movement that is shifting the moral narrative in the United States about the intersecting pandemics of poverty, racism, voter suppression, environmental injustice, militarism, and COVID-19. 

The Poor People’s Campaign has spent the past three years building a broad and deep national moral fusion movement that crosses the many divides in our society, creating what Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “a new unsettling force.” From the thousands who launched the Poor People’s Campaign in 2018 with 40 days of direct actions—to the over two and half million who participated in the online mass march on Washington, D.C., on June 20, 2020—to the hundreds of thousands of people who are now active in 46 states, the movement is growing day by day, person by person, organization by organization, region by region, state by state. 

When we “flex our power together” and “lift from the bottom up, everyone rises.” With these words from the Rev. Dr. William Barber at the Moral Monday action in Mississippi on April 19, 2021, he announced the Poor People’s Campaign plans for the next 500 days. The movement will continue to grow and move forward toward two massive actions that will bring us all together to flex our power as a new and unstoppable force in the world: 

• June 21, 2021: Online Mass March on Washington 
• June 18, 2022: In-person Mass Poor People and Low Wage Workers Assembly and Moral March in Washington, D.C.

As a mobilizing partner of the Poor People’s Campaign, WILPF US plays an important role in growing the movement’s base as we build toward those two mass actions. Whatever your connection is with WILPF – individual member/supporter, member of a branch, part of a program committee – there are many ways to be involved.

• Be informed. Keep up with regular news and updates by joining the Poor People’s Campaign.
• Find your state PPC committee on the above website to find out what opportunities there are for you to get involved in your region.
• Identify and engage organizations and groups in your area that have a base of people impacted by the five evils (systemic poverty, systemic racism, ecological devastation, war economy/militarism, and distorted moral narrative), plus other organizations and individuals that share a commitment to the principles of the PPC, and invite them to join the campaign by becoming an endorsing organization/group.
• Engage in and encourage others to participate in PPC campaigns and actions (e.g., Moral Mondays, national and state press conferences).
• Share information about the Poor People’s Campaign in your group’s newsletters, on Facebook and on other social media platforms.
• Develop skills, knowledge, & collective analysis by studying and exchanging ideas about the five intersecting issues of the campaign.
• If you’re a member of a WILPF branch and/or program committee, identify the intersections between your issues and those of the PPC and find ways to work in coalition.
• Participate in national PPC training programs (e.g., about recruitment strategies, how to organize).
• Practice the fundamental principles of the Poor People’s Campaign.

Together, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom-US and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival are creating and growing that new and unsettling force that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jane Addams called for in their eras. For more information about ways you can be involved with the campaign over the next 500 days and to get on the WILPF-PPC mailing list, contact WILPF-PPC Liaison Dorothy Van Soest at wilpf4ppc@gmail.com.