Florida organization to hold rally advocating for poor residents following Hurricane Ian

Residents and community leaders are invited to a rally on Saturday to ask questions and share their concerns about the lack of relief available to low-income communities following Hurricane Ian.

The Florida Poor People’s Campaign will host the rally in Fort Myers at St. Phillip CME Church located at 1920 Lillie Street. The rally starts at noon. The voter mobilization is between 1:00 and 3:00 pm.

The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is uniting people across Florida to challenge systemic racism and poverty.

“When the storm hit (Hurricane Ian) we knew from our experience that low income people in impacted areas would bear the brunt of it, have the hardest and longest road to recovery,” said Daniel Jones, volunteer with The Florida Poor People’s Campaign. “Immediately after the storm hit we began calling our members and supporters in impacted areas to see what kind of impact the storm was having on people. Poor and low income families were not in a position to get to safe places during the storm and we're not being able to immediately get the support that they needed.”

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Jones said he noticed a lack of relief efforts in communities throughout Florida.

“We saw a lack of support happening among farmworker communities,” said Jones. “We also saw people living in mobile home parks in Orange County were dealing with severe flooding and lack of access to water that were largely Black and Puerto Rican communities. We heard about it happening among poor white people on Pine Island. We heard about it happening among the Black working class community in Dunbar. Everywhere we looked regardless of race, immigration status or background poor and low income people were facing a dire emergency and weren't getting the support they needed.”

Jones said the reality is that poor and low income people who were left vulnerable to the storm are still in crisis in many places.

“This is not the narrative being pushed by the governor,” said Jones. “These stories have to be told. These people need help. They need relief.”

Jones said there’s a lot at stake right now with the upcoming election.

“What kind of a democracy is it when the elderly, disabled, homeless folks are left to die or left to fend for themselves in a storm like this?,” said Jones. “What kind of a democracy is it when landlords are allowed to pursue potentially unlawful evictions of people after storms by not getting proper approval and just declaring a mobile home park or a building uninhabitable and kicking their tenants out because they see an opportunity to redevelop or get higher paying tenants in there. This storm has revealed a deep crisis in our democracy.”

Jones said as a campaign the focus is impacting policy and change.

“We’re going out into the community to provide relief,” said Jones. “We have a truckload of supplies. But also ensuring that people go out and vote. In spite of everything going on it’s so important for people to still go out and vote and make their voices heard as a community. We really encourage folks to say, ‘Who is the candidate who's most likely to support living wages, health care and an expansion of our democracy and really deal with systemic racism?'

Alethea Shapiro, a community organizer and Naples resident didn’t hesitate to get involved.

“They (Florida Poor People's Campaign) reached out to me and asked if I would help with the rally and connect some of the communities that I was working with in Naples and Fort Myers,” said 43-year-old-Shapiro. “I asked people that were affected by the hurricane to attend this rally and connect with people that would advocate for their needs.”

Shapiro said this is an opportunity for residents to lean on each other and make their voices heard.

“This rally is a good opportunity to bring people with similar socioeconomic, or racial backgrounds, together, to see that there's power in numbers,” she said. “What they’re facing is not individual to them, it's actually a failure of our system. I hope this rally inspires people to use their stories to push for change and to bring attention to these communities that are often forgotten.”

Erica Van Buren is the underserved communities reporter for The News-Press and Naples Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Network. Connect with her at EVanBuren@gannett.com or on Twitter: @EricaVanBuren32

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Fort Myers: Poor People's Campaign slated for Saturday