The American Recovery Act & Move the Money: A Rare Window of Opportunity

Image by pasja1000 from Pixabay.

By Marybeth Gardam
ONE WILPF Call Team

April 2021

The next ONE WILPF call on Thursday, April 8 (4 pm PST / 7 pm EST) will have two wonderful speakers offering insight and action plans to redirect short term and longer term public funding towards the public good. We have a rare opportunity in this moment to support a bold, people-centered agenda.

You won’t want to miss it – register for the call now!

Long Term:  Move the Money - A Campaign to Cut Defense Spending

Reverend Paul Dordal will describe the work of a group of concerned citizens in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. They have started a growing coalition of organizations and individuals that believe a reduction in the bloated military budget is the only way to assist the millions of those in dire need. Even a modest reduction of 10% over time would create the kind of revenue their city and other municipalities could use to ensure that our population has their basic needs met.

The Pittsburgh Move the Money Coalition is working with Reps. Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan, who have established the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus in the US House of Representatives. These efforts are spreading to communities around the country.

Rev. Dordal, an ordained priest in the Syro-Chaldean Church of North America, currently serves full-time as the Director of Spiritual Care at a large healthcare system in Pittsburgh. He also serves as adjunct faculty in the Doctor of Ministry in Integrative Chaplaincy degree program at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He leads the Pittsburgh Move the Money Campaign Steering Committee. Paul is a member of Veterans For Peace and the co-director of Christian Alliance For Peace.

Shorter Term: The American Recovery Act – An Opportunity to Influence the Dialogue

Activists around the country need to act NOW to influence decisions that will be made about how the moneys that your city and county receive will be spent. Who needs to be part of that process and how could it work in your community?

WILPF’s own Nancy Price will discuss how her town – Davis, CA – is pressing for a values-driven distribution of their share of the American Recovery Act funding, to be sure that the funding addresses the real and unmet needs of the underserved and communities of color who have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 epidemic.

The March-April Congressional Recess is a major opportunity for our communities to mobilize in their home districts and make our voices heard for supporting a bold and aggressive people-centered agenda. The Frontline, an alliance of indigenous, black, Latino, labor, and frontline action organizers, want folks to contact DEMOCRATIC members of Congress who are either already supporting the President's recovery program or who are neutral, leaning left. They ask that when we contact these members we ask them to support the THRIVE Agenda, which has been put forward by the Democratic Party and endorsed by a long list of national organizations including WILPF US (through the W$D Committee's recommendation).

They are offering lots of good videos for skills training here.

And their Recess Toolkit is accessible here.

How to Register for ONE WILPF Calls

Registration for ONE WILPF Calls is open to all members and the public.

If you have never been on one of the calls before, please be sure to register.

These calls are AUDIO calls, not ZOOM calls, and you should plan to join the call with both your phone and your computer. Once you register you’ll get a reminder email 2 days, then 2 hours before the call begins. That email will have the dial in phone number (DON’T use the “JOIN WITH YOUR COMPUTER” button), instead click the link to join the “Social Webinar”.