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A group of women in the poorest district of Pennsylvania came together in 1991 and organized the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU) after welfare cuts threatened their families and community. KWRU sought to reframe the welfare debate as part of a larger fight for human rights, rather than one about personal responsibility for poverty or charity-based responses from governments.

KWRU called the welfare cuts a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Section 23 and 25 (the right to a job and the right to an adequate standard of living) and organized other impoverished people by teaching them about these rights. Their position is that the government has an obligation to meet the basic human needs of those living in poverty. By framing the issue in this way, KWRU was able to mobilize a group of people that had not been mobilized and gain national and international attention about the continuing poverty in the Americas.

KWRU used physical sites – a center where people could receive assistance with food and housing, and a tent city for the homeless with a medical clinic – as a way to have regular, ongoing contact with poor people, and therefore be able to educate, mobilize and organize them. To educate people about their rights, they developed teams of poor people as organizers who could, because of their experience, distinguish what was going to move people to act.

In 1998, poor families from all over the U.S. traveled in a bus for a month to 35 poor urban and rural communities, gathering the stories of human rights violations. They collected detailed stories of people struggling for survival and used these to document economic human rights abuses in the USA by releasing the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Report.

Working with the Center for Constitutional Rights and CUNY’s International Women’s Human Rights Law Clinic and other organizations, KWRU filed a petition in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights charging the U.S. government with violations on economic human rights. These legal and documentation efforts fueled a massive human rights organizing drive that culminated in the March of the Americas in December 1999, when organizations of the poor and homeless from across the Americas marched from Washington, D.C., to the United Nations to protest economic human rights violations. The filing of the petition and the march to the UN drew press and public attention at the national and international level to the persistence of poverty in Americas.

Completed in June 2001.