#PubWorkers4Justice is a community of publishing workers building toward social justice. We believe a better world is possible and we believe that building a better world requires a broad swath of organized workers.

To that end, #PW4J is planning a community-wide Volunteer Pledge on January 16th, 2021. By asking workers to pledge their time and energy to community organizing during the week of the presidential inauguration, we aim to shift attention away from national electoral politics and toward local grassroots engagement. 

Below is a list of organizations engaged in various forms of work that we believe are crucial to building the future in which we want to live. (These are our suggestions, but you should feel free to find other efforts with which you’d like to engage.)

Some of the ideas around which we are focusing our efforts at #PW4J include, mutual aid, prison/police abolition, housing justice, food co-ops, and community gardens. While many of the organizations listed here are based in NYC, here are some ways to get involved in our post-election volunteer pledge that can be applied anywhere:

Community organizing begins with getting to know the people in your community. Do you know your neighbors? One way to get to know them better is to create a bulletin board for your building lobby and/or write letters introducing yourself to your neighbors. Once you know who your neighbors are, you can start building a tenant union, as per this guide from Brick Underground.

Support incarcerated people

The summer of 2020 saw unprecedented uprisings in response to the continued murder of Black people by police across the country, including the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville. We, in #PW4J, believe that striving toward prison/police abolition is the only meaningful response to these murders.

One way to get involved in prison/police abolition is to build connections with currently incarcerated people. For guidance on how to support incarcerated people, we recommend the following resources:

→ Check out this two-part episode of Beyond Prisons on communicating with incarcerated people

→ Plan a letter-writing campaign as per this guideline from Survived and Punished

This year also saw the deaths of over 300,000 people in America due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The pandemic, like all natural disasters, brought to light many of the systemic failings of electoral politics under capitalism and highlighted the need for people to band together and create the solutions that our government has failed to provide.

Mutual aid is the collective coordination of such efforts to meet one another's needs. Some ways to get involved with local mutual aid efforts, like Mutual Aid NYC (MANYC), include:

✿ Shopping for and delivering groceries/supplies
✿ Preparing cooked food
✿ Walking dogs and performing other types of animal care
✿ Helping neighbors with childcare and/or eldercare
✿ Providing guidance and support with social services
✿ Coordinating between volunteers and neighbors in need
✿ Conducting remote check-ins
✿ Distributing flyers to drive community engagement