By Kelly S.
The Nonviolent Medicaid Army Week of Action has played a large part in the development of the New York Nonviolent Medicaid Army state formation. Not only did the 2024 Week of Action mark the official launch of our group, this year’s Day of Action went a long way in consolidating and developing a strong group of leaders to carry out this work. This past September’s actions in front of the closed Mt. Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in New York City, and near Albany Medical Center in Albany, further strengthened and energized our statewide organizing efforts.
Our folks were inspired and eager to continue to organize around the Medicaid cut-offs and other attacks on our healthcare. Taking collective action is not the only tactic in our theory of change, but the collective planning, the art build and the execution of the action can be really galvanizing, as it was in our case.
With that experience and given the current attacks on SNAP and the implementation of work requirements starting November 1, our NYC team recently launched a multi-week SNAP organizing drive. We are using the amazing toolkit created by Put People First – PA and adapting it to the specifics of New York. Our goal is to visit multiple communities around New York City through the end of the year. By holding drives every weekend in a different community, we hope to better understand our base, educate folks on the cruel work requirements that began November 1 and the exemptions to those requirements, and build a growing and powerful movement of the poor. For us as still a relatively young formation, the goal to do (most) every weekend between now and January 1 is daunting but so are the challenges facing our communities. This is not a time to let fear get in the way.
We kicked the SNAP organizing drive off in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, at a spot connected to the Tompkins Square Food Distro. We found almost immediately that asking about SNAP sparked great organizing conversations. One 72 year-old gentleman talked about how he worked his whole life and had hoped at some point he would be able to stop and not stand in food lines. Another gentleman said he has been trying to find a job for over a year but asked how he is supposed to get one when he doesn’t have stable housing and doesn’t have food to eat.
The following weekend, we went to Harlem. We did an organizing conversation training, practiced with each other and then headed out into the street. In our training, we emphasized how we are not here to take the place of social workers or case managers; we are here to support people, cut through isolation, and to help navigate the arduous system that puts stumbling block after stumbling block in folks’ way as they try and get the food and healthcare they and their families need to just survive. Next weekend, we’ll be in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and we will keep going, keep talking to people across the five boroughs of New York City.
People are clear when we talk to them. They know the system is broken and has been for a long time. Or perhaps it’s working as intended, allowing millions to suffer while the millionaires and billionaires get richer and richer. We know it doesn’t have to be this way. We know the richest nation in the history of the world has MORE THAN ENOUGH to provide healthcare, food and housing to all. We know these things are human rights and so we will continue to talk, share, support and organize, organize, organize!!!
- Base-building, Medicaid Cut Offs Organizing Drive, Nonviolent Medicaid Army, SNAP
- new york city, ny nvma, Projects of Survival