2025 is a special year: the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) is celebrating 20 years of uplifting the voices of those on the front lines of the fight to end homelessness. We need your support to keep building momentum! Please help us honor this milestone and strengthen collective work toward a more humane world with a contribution of $20, $220, $2,220.
In 2005, representatives of seven organizations along the west coast began strategizing around how to address the root causes of homelessness, starting with the actual day-to-day realities people were experiencing in the streets. Since then we have grown to eleven kick-ass member organizations in five states, themselves comprising thousands of unhoused community members and allies; five central office staff members; an incredible board with deep roots in this work; and hundreds of dedicated supporters and volunteer attorneys, artists, researchers, organizers, and others playing crucial roles in the fight to end the criminalization of homelessness and ensure housing for all.
What we have accomplished is as important as how we’ve done it. Over the past two decades, we have never forgotten our roots. We continue to be accountable to people living in the streets, in vehicles, and on the margins of cities, small towns, and rural areas. Outreach to unhoused people—talking to people about what they’re experiencing, what they need, what we should prioritize in our campaigns—was and still is the backbone of everything WRAP and our members do.
In fact, WRAP members are conducting a massive round of systematic outreach this winter, surveying people to find out what is happening in the streets following the US Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Grants Pass case and documenting how sweeps are affecting people. Sweeps entail police harassment, citations, arrests, displacement, and ultimately, when there is literally nowhere to legally sleep, banishment from our communities.
WRAP members tested our survey during outreach in 5 cities this fall, talking with 41 people. From these preliminary interviews, 90% of participants had been swept—displaced—in the last month. Of those, 71% of respondents were given no advance notice that they would have to move. Belongings were thrown away 72% of the time. 83% of those swept were offered NO services (e.g., shelter, housing, etc.), and 79% were unable to access legal assistance. Over half of those swept identified as a person with a disability. We are gearing up to ask the same questions in over a dozen cities and small towns across the U.S. Our goal is to interview at least 1,500 people, and it’s likely we will talk with many more.
This outreach documents early effects of the SCOTUS decision: that cities are criminalizing people with ever more impunity for the human acts of sleeping, sitting, standing still, and eating. This reality is informing the ongoing development of our Legal Defense Clinic Project, bringing the power of lawyers to our movement for short-term resourcing and long-term change in collaboration with the National Homelessness Law Center. What we hear in outreach will also directly help WRAP and members strategize our 2025 organizing campaigns toward ending violent policing, and continue to work with housing justice groups to make housing a human right. Most importantly, this systematic outreach means that we can say with confidence that when we speak publicly about the experiences of unhoused community members, hundreds if not thousands of people directly contributed to our perspective. We can also say that our members collaborated to shape our narrative and demands, and that we have worked hard to ensure that it speaks to larger historical, structural processes.
Thank you for your support!!! The lives of poor people will not be made better by the charity of others. Rather, true systemic change comes from the power of all of us working collectively, led by those who know the impacts of unjust systems firsthand. A growing, incredibly committed and generous group of donors continues to support our work. From day one, well over half of our income has come from individual donors who truly believe in WRAP’s mission. Our donor base runs the gamut from public housing residents and people on fixed income all the way to people sharing inheritances. We value every one of those gifts. Cumulatively, they sustain us spiritually and financially.
You all have sustained us for 20 years, enabling us to do this work of taking the lead of people most affected in the fight to end the criminalization of poverty and homelessness and for housing for all. We need you to help us bring more people into this movement to continue building power. Please consider sharing our work with at least three friends who might be interested in supporting WRAP and our members. Let us know if you need additional zine copies (see enclosed), stickers, posters, or other materials; we would be so happy to mail them to you. With your support, collectively we will build a society in which a well-housed, healthy, vibrant community is a reality.
Peace,
Paul Boden
