When You Lift from the Bottom, Everybody Rises: Social Workers and The Poor People’s Campaign

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Featuring: SWEPT (Social Workers Ending Poverty Together)

The contemporary Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival aims to eradicate the interlocking systemic injustices of poverty, racism, militarism, and environmental devastation; it also confronts the false moral narrative that sustains them. Social workers involved in the Poor People’s Campaign have found that it enhances the effectiveness and ethical dimensions of their daily work from the clinic to the community and from direct practice to policy and research. In this webinar we explore how and why that happens, and the ways that the campaign turns pain into power for lasting change.

*Zoom link will be sent to all participants the day of the event.

Social Workers Ending Poverty Together (SWEPT) Brief Bios

Monica Beemer, MSW, is a social worker and organizer for the Houseless Bill of Rights and the Welfare Rights Union; she served as executive director of Sisters of the Road and KBOO Community Radio in Portland, Oregon and currently works with Street Books, bike-powered librarians for the houseless community, and Outside the Frame, a film school for houseless youth.

Larry Bresler, MSW, JD,  is the director of Organize Ohio, an organization that works to promote and assist grassroots organizing in Ohio; for the past 17 years he has served as an adjunct faculty member at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Applied Social Sciences.

Mary Bricker-Jenkins, MSW, PhD was a welfare worker in 1968 when a social work professor slipped her a piece of paper suggesting she attend a certain meeting.  She did, and met a circle of social workers organizing with the National Welfare Rights Organization and the original Poor People’s Campaign.  She has never left that circle.   She retired from Temple University in 2005.

Khalilah Collins, MSW, calls herself a social justice practitioner.  As the Project Manager for the police deflection project in Louisville. KY, her work focuses on addressing social injustices through community organizing and education. She teaches practice from this perspective at Spalding University (Louisville) and Salisbury University (Maryland).

Rev. Rowan Fairgrove, EPs, MLIS, is a retired Research Librarian, an organizer of the annual Homeless Person’s Interfaith Memorial in Santa Clara County, and a volunteer with the Poor People’s Campaign in California.

Barbara Kasper, MA, MSW, is a retired SUNY Brockport social work professor and convener of the Social Welfare Action Alliance (SWAA), a national organization of radical human service workers.

Renee Koubiadis, MSW/LSW, is a member of the NJ Poor People’s Campaign Coordinating Committee; works as the Anti-Poverty Program Director at New Jersey Citizen Action facilitating the statewide Anti-Poverty Network.

Kristin Colangelo, LCSW, LCADC, CSS, is a clinical social worker and formerly homeless mother with over 20 years experience educating and organizing among the poor and dispossessed, building the movement to end poverty and for our rights to housing, healthcare, and freedom from hunger with The National Union of the Homeless, Put People First PA, National Welfare Rights Union and the Kairos Center.

Ann Rall, MSW, Ph.D., is an organizer and case worker with the  Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and the National Welfare Rights Union and teaches social work at Eastern Michigan University.