We Shall Overcome #WSO2019 takes place over the weekend of October 4/5/6.

At least the main thrust does.

Since the turn of the year activists and organisers have been badging their gigs WSO and raising help for those who need it, whenever and wherever that need is greatest.

It really is that easy.

You can build your own event, or you can badge up something which already exists; if you’re a band on tour you can ask for donations at that weekend’s gigs, or rattle the bucket the whole way round.

It doesn’t even have to be music. We have had poetry and spoken word, history walks, art auctions, lectures, snooker tournaments, boxing nights, battle of the bands, bake-offs……we have done the lot and it was all amazing.

There have been more than 1000 since October 2015, and each has raised help for food banks, soup kitchens, homeless outreach, crisis centres, refugee support, youth projects; basically wherever help is most needed on the streets of your town.

We are NOT a charity. We are a ramshackle alliance of people who aren’t prepared to sit and watch others suffer while we have it in our power to help. We don’t collect donations centrally, everything raised stays where it is and goes straight to the grassroots in the town who raised it.

We Shall Overcome is a metaphorical banner to march under. We help give your local gig a national identity and we help promote it. The scale of our collective efforts gives us all a sense of belonging and a sense of solidarity with like-minded people the four corners of the UK. It gives us a political voice, and it empowers others who may have felt they could not change things and now see they can.

And we can.

We all can.

Those 1000+ gigs have raised food, cash, warm clothing, footwear, tents, toiletries, sleeping bags and sanitary towels to an estimated total of £450,000; and from the first tin of beans to the last 20p piece, it ALL mattered.

It mattered because every last penny says we are not beaten and we will fight til they lose.

JOIN US! BRING A GIG TO THE PARTY!!