Marty's Fundraising for The People's Lobby 2020

There have been a few bright spots in an otherwise god-awful year. The brightest ones are the projects I worked on with my friends and family at The People’s Lobby (TPL): 

• Canvassing for Congresswoman-elect Marie Newman, State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, and Bernie Sanders
• Virtual phone and text banking (often with a DJ on Zoom) for the Fair Tax
• Combining a love of politics and comics for an event on the Fair Tax
• Working on the Budget For Black Lives where we succeeded in redirecting $157 million from the Sheriff's budget to communities impacted by mass incarceration
• Developing Anti-racist curriculums to address the racist acts we saw in Bridgeport and Canaryville during the uprisings this summer

TPL also threw down for Pre-trial fairness, Oak Park Village President, Illinois State Representative races, and protecting the election rallies. And More. And we accomplished this while shifting from traditional methods to completely virtual ones. 

How could I not be proud of this amount of work, given the challenges we faced?

TPL’s values are my values. That’s why I was drawn to them. But what keeps me coming back are the methods: TPL challenges my cynicism and embraces the inner idealist. They’ve helped me channel feelings of rage and hopelessness into actions that have made a difference in my community. 

I think that 2020 was awful because it was the culmination of decaades of bad policies, neglect, exploitation, and an almost pathological belief in individualism. The way forward -- the only way forward -- is to build relationships, build power, and ensure that our leaders work for us. Put differently, the only way forward is people power.

Building people power takes resources: Printing flyers, Zoom licenses, paying staff to stay on top of legisliatve issues, buying masks (and hand warmers for winter actions). Every dollar we raise goes towards building a better, more just world. Thats why I’ve committed to raising $1,000 for The People’s Lobby by 12/12. Can you help support us by donating $25 or whatever you are able to?

Thank you for being part of this movement to build a better world for all of us!