We Shall Overcome is officially four years old today and still battling on, fighting the worst excesses of government policy and the pain it inflicts on the poorest and most vulnerable in our communities.
In those four years ordinary people up and down this land have organised well over 1000 events in 150 different towns and cities, raising an estimated £500,000 worth of food, cash, warm clothing, toiletries, sanitary towels, tents, sleeping bags, furniture and electrical goods all going direct to the front line of need in the community which raised them.
We have supported food banks, soup kitchens, homeless outreach, youth projects, crisis centres and just about anything else tackling the multiple impacts of targeted, ideologically-driven austerity aimed at those least able to fight back.
Well, we’ve been fighting back.
All of us.
It took THOUSANDS of organisers, musicians, poets, artists, venues, activists and campaigners to pull this off and it has been a genuine act of nationwide solidarity I have been proud to represent from the start.
Together we prove there is no such thing as a meaningless gesture, because all those seemingly meaningless gestures add up into something very meaningful indeed. From the first person who rocked up with a 4-pack of beans at the very first show, to the donations I received in Harrow last night. It ALL mattered, it all continues to matter.
It is perhaps fitting that today we celebrate housing another gentleman facing street homelessness. Thanks to a combined donation by Poetry on the Picket Line, Commoners Choir and Lindsay Rutland for Wool Shall Overcome, Pauline Town has been able to sort out a flat for a chap named Colin. Colin has health issues and had been evicted on to the streets with all his possessions lost. Today he has a new home and a new start.
And yes, you might sneer at our ‘one life at a time’ motto, it might seem like a lost cause and a waste of time.
Well try telling that to Colin.
We fight til they lose.
#WSO2019 is booking.
Bring em on.
Joe Solo 