When WRAP says “we” – we literally mean every single group and person that built our foundation and has sustained it for the past 20 years!
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 are experiencing in the streets. Since then, WRAP has grown to twelve kick-ass member organizations across 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 artists, researchers, attorneys, organizers, and others playing crucial roles in the fight to end the criminalization of poverty and homelessness and ensure housing for all. Building member power, sustaining funders, engaging volunteers – hell, even holding down an office for 20 years – is no joke and something WRAP can be proud of.
Over the past 20 years, we have never forgotten our roots. We continue to be accountable to people living in the streets, parks and encampments. People in vehicles, in motels & SROs, in public housing, and on the margins of cities, small towns, and rural areas. We do this by channeling local organizing work and leadership development into a larger regional and national forum. WRAP also provides a peer based support system to sustain this local organizing work with and among poor and unhoused community members.
WRAP facilitates discussions, analysis, sharing, and skill-building across groups. WRAP staff visits with local groups to provide technical assistance and to learn from each other. We work together to collectively design and create outreach tools which seek the input of homeless people into all the policy positions, campaign priorities, artwork, and public education documents we create.
WRAP believes that bringing the voices of homeless people to the forefront of homeless policy and organizing discussions on the national level is crucial. WRAP’s entire work is oriented around deepening and scaling up the social change work that our members do, while building the capacity and leadership of WRAP members to more effectively engage in social change. Through issue-based inclusive community outreach, WRAP members document the voices and priorities of poor and unhoused people – many experiencing acute personal challenges, disabilities, and living on fixed incomes or with insecure part-time jobs. These are the community members who are most disenfranchised and misrepresented in our nation’s political process, and who often are not represented by mainstream “poverty” associations. 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 does.
Most recently, WRAP members began conducting a massive round of systematic outreach this past 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. We are 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 recently launched an outreach survey focused on the impact and prevalence of sweeps/displacement in our communities. Of the initial 223 people from whom we have documented responses, some clear trends are already showing. From these initial responses, 93% of participants had been swept—displaced—in the last month. Of those, 67% of respondents were given no advance notice. Belongings were thrown away 62% of the time. 81% of those swept were offered NO services (e.g., shelter, housing, etc.), and 92% were unable to access legal assistance, despite the fact that 73% of sweeps were conducted by local or state police. 81% ended up still living in the streets after the sweeps with 61% of these people given “stay away orders” by the cops. 45% of people swept identified as living with a disability. Our goal is to survey at least 1,500 people, and it’s likely we will talk with many more.
This outreach illustrates the 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 violent reality is informing the ongoing development of our Legal Defense Clinic Project (in partnership with the National Homelessness Law Center), bringing the power of legal representation to accountable community organizing for short-term resourcing and long-term change. What we hear in outreach will also directly help WRAP strategize our organizing campaigns toward ending violent banishment policing, and continue our work with housing justice groups to make housing a human right.
Juxtaposed with this sense of accomplishment around how we have built incredible community strength is the deadly reality we are witnessing today: police brutality in the streets; unabashed racism, transphobia, and xenophobia; and dehumanizing, neoliberal policy and funding priorities. Wiping out Medicare, HUD, SNAP, CDC, etc., is gonna kill people. They know this, we know this, so the question becomes – What the hell are we gonna do about it?
None of us are gonna survive the shitstorm that has formed over all of our heads alone. Just as we didn’t survive the last 20 years alone. We will continue to learn and build together, with love and respect for each other.
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. We need you to help us bring more people into this movement to continue building power. Your support gives us hope that, collectively, we can build a society in which a well-housed, healthy, vibrant community is a reality.
We need a dramatic shift from the “I” (the unhoused, elderly, tenants, immigrants, trans, etc.) to the “WE” (humans, people, us, everyone). While we also acknowledge that some of us sure as hell are targeted, attacked and hurt much more than others, we also know that this is not their shit to fight on their own. We build power when we collectively identify and call out the racism, ableism, sexism, and all forms of oppression being instigated. It’s not up to individuals to fight oppression by themselves, and we can’t change the system that oppresses so many people by focusing on one issue area. If we continue to do our organizing on a single issue, we’re not going to change the overall system of oppression.
In this intense environment, the “tried and true” systems of “effective” community organizing, litigation, and legislature strategies need to evolve. In every flyer we make, every t-shirt, protest sign, demand, press release and training we do, we need to be sure we are talking about all people that are getting fucked throughout this process. Local organizers must still reflect the day to day priorities of the work they are doing while we shift our strategies to build collective power.
Visit WRAP’s website (www.wraphome.org) to read our 20-year zine, see the video of us in action, check out amazing artwork, and the 20-year poster from our Minister of Culture.
*** The impetus for creating WRAP, the support and encouragement to have it be its own entity vested in its members is a testament to the Coalition On Homelessness, SF crew and members over the past 38 years of accountable community organizing at home.
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