 Hi, and welcome to People's Dispatch. We're here with Shali Gupta-Barns, who's the policy director of the Cairo Center and is the campaign manager for the Poor People's Campaign. The Poor People's Campaign is an effort to revive the last campaign of Martin Luther King, Jr., shortly before he was assassinated. The campaign seeks to unite diverse sectors of U.S. society, uniting their common interests and fighting against racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and militarism. So, last year, the Poor People's Campaign held 40 days of action, wherein the actions were held across the country in many different states. And since then, what are the actions that the Poor People's Campaign has been engaged in? What are you working towards? Can you tell us a bit about that? Yes, of course. The 40 days of action were a really momentous moment of the campaign. It was the 50th anniversary of the first Poor People's Campaign, and we were able to have six weeks of sustained coordinated activity in more than 40 states in Washington, D.C. And since then, we've been organizing in those states and really developing capacity and infrastructure. We've held Poor People's Hearings, where poor and dispossessed people across these many states are coming together to testify to the conditions of poverty, racism, militarism, and ecological devastation, and how they're playing out in their local communities. We've delivered the demands of the campaign, which were released also last year to local state houses across the country. So state legislatures and state lawmakers are aware that this campaign wasn't just one moment in contemporary history, that people are mobilizing and organizing in a sustained manner in these states. And we've also recently come off a 30-state bus tour, where 30 states across the country organize tours in different parts of their states to highlight, again, these conditions, and also build relationships and connections among these communities and continue the organizing work that this campaign is founded on. And then now we're moving towards bringing together the states and also our national partners, including different labor relationships, religion relationships, and other key organizations in the country together in Washington, D.C. again for a Poor People's Moral Action Congress in June. Okay, can you tell us a little bit about that Congress? What is going to be going on? What are you guys hoping to gain from that? Yeah, we're really excited about this opportunity and moment. We know that, you know, for this campaign to be, to really both change the narrative around these issues, but also to build the power necessary to hold our democratically elected leaders accountable to our needs and demands, we have to really consolidate these states. And so we're bringing together hundreds of people from the state committees and we're going to have, so over three days we'll have many kind of plenary sessions where we'll be together as a group in different workshops and tracks. We're going to start off with the release of our moral budget, a Poor People's Moral Budget, which takes the demands of the campaign and asks what would it really look like to realize these demands, what kind of investments would we have to make as a society and what would we gain where we are organizing a presidential candidates forum where we're inviting the candidates for the 2020 election to come, you know, address the members of this campaign and interested people on our issues. In the lead up to the 2016 election, poverty was not mentioned once in the 26 national debates that occurred on both sides of the party, on both parties. And so we're trying to ensure that that does not happen this time around. And we'll have a national freedom school, you know, all of the different elements of the campaign will come together to learn and to study and exchange strategies and tactics. And then we were also organizing a congressional hearing, a formal congressional hearing in one of the committees on Capitol Hill. Oh, and finally, sorry, we will be announcing the next steps on what we'll be doing towards 2020, including a massive march in assembly in Washington in 2020. That's amazing. And why organize the poor in the United States? What are the conditions that people are facing in one of the richest countries in the world? Yeah, it's always really surprising for people to understand and even just here, even in the United States that over the past decades, poverty and inequality and racism in all these different, you know, evils that we're confronting have actually deepened. And so we're in a situation today where there are 140 million poor people and low income people. So by that, we mean, you know, people who are living just above the poverty line who over the course of the year, whether it's through job insecurity, a healthcare crisis, an emergency, a layoff, anything like that, will move below that poverty line. So we've done, you know, research using U.S. census data and, you know, have arrived, have concluded that there are 140 million people, 43% of the population that lives in poverty or is one kind of paycheck away from poverty, one emergency away from poverty. And, you know, we understand that to be able to... So in out of this population, you know, you don't just have, you know, you can't separate a housing crisis from a healthcare crisis. You can't separate all of these things that are kind of intermingled and all together. So, and they have, you know, the way that they impact different populations is different. That's how it's always been. But there's some kind of uniting factor that's emerging these days where you have, you know, even though 60% of black people in the United States and 64% of Latinx people are poor or low income, you also have one out of every three white people or 66 million white people who are poor in the United States. So there are common interests that are coming and that's actually what's bringing these people together. And unless we actually come together around those common interests, we won't ever be able to change the root causes behind these crises. Well, thank you so much for sharing with us. That's all we have time for and thank you for watching People's Dispatch.