Building Tenant Power During Covid-19

While Covid-19 did not create the crisis of the rental system, the pandemic has pushed it to a new frontier. As a result of illness and precautionary lockdown, millions of people have lost their jobs, and millions more have suffered a loss of wages that prevents them from making rent each month. Still, landlords are demanding rent, often employing tactics of intimidation and violence to get it.

But renters around the world are organizing to fight back.

This toolkit, developed by KC Tenants, aims to help you and neighbors get organized in a time of Covid-19 — no matter your previous organizing experience.

The toolkit answers questions like:

• How can we organize our neighbors under lockdown?
• How do we build collective understanding that inability to pay rent is not our fault?
• And most importantly, how do tenants build power that can lead to systemic change?

Complete with guides for conducting research on your landlord, convening organizing conversations with your fellow renters, forming a tenants union, or even escalating towards a rent strike, the KC Tenants Organizing Toolkit provides a framework for tenant organizers during Covid-19 and after.

KC Tenants is an organization led by a multiracial, anti-racist, multigenerational base of poor and working class tenants in Kansas City, USA. As a grassroots, democratic organization, KC Tenants functions on the proposition "that the people closest to the problem are closest to the solutions." To learn more about KC Tenants and their work, visit their website or Twitter. We are honored to showcase their extraordinary work here.

Download the KC Tenants Covid Organizing Toolkit and begin building power with fellow tenants.

The Progressive International aims not only to broaden the reach of these organizing materials, but also to build the conditions necessary for an internationalist tenants movement.

If you are a tenant organizer or a member of a tenant union that would like to engage with the Progressive International — or organize actions related to this campaign — please write to [email protected].