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Dear friend,

We live in a country where poverty and economic precarity is widespread. Most people live paycheck to paycheck, walking a razor’s edge to keep them out of poverty. While it is a symptom of a sick country, it is also an urgent opportunity for Americans to demand economic security for the least of these, who are in fact, most of us.

In this issue:
* Poverty numbers
* A prayer to end poverty
* RSVP We Pray Freedom Launch event with Freedom Church of the Poor
* Register for Severed

With radical hope,

The Kairos Team
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** Summary of poverty numbers
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Fresh poverty data confirms what millions already know: nearly half the country is poor or low income. That’s 140 million people—families one car breakdown or ER visit away from falling into crisis. The burden falls heaviest on children and communities of color, but the majority of the poor are white, working-age adults.

And the crisis is about to get worse. The new “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” rips away food, housing, and health care for millions while enriching corporations and the ultra-rich. As the ground shifts beneath us, the call grows louder: fight poverty, not the poor.
Read our full report. ([link removed])


** A prayer to end poverty from We Pray Freedom
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This week’s abridged ritual offering was written and delivered by Cedar Monroe in Olympia, Washington, for the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral

Revival’s Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Simultaneous State House Assemblies.

If these offerings ground your work, leaving a review of We Pray Freedom helps a lot.
Leave a review ([link removed])

So now, here we are. We are homeless. We are denied health care. We experience police violence and state violence and incarceration. We can’t get decent jobs, and we can’t pay our rent, and our wages are not keeping up with inflation, and we don’t know how we are going to feed our families. Our people are dying from disease induced by pollution, and nothing is done to address the climate change that will damage each of our communities, some beyond repair. All of these realities are felt even in the poor white communities I am from, but Indigenous and Black and brown communities experience them at even higher rates, along with constant racism and hatred at every level of society. Queer people and trans people, we are also being targeted. We are in a particularly dangerous moment when white Christian nationalism gains power; they are trying to roll back all the gains of the civil rights movement.

And we are facing an election that makes us feel helpless, because there are no candidates that are even addressing our plight. In this moment, capitalism and colonialism and imperialism have the upper hand. They are winning. We feel helpless in this moment. They have all the power. And so many people are dying because of it.

So I want you to breathe again. As you breathe in, imagine that you are drawing power, power from the earth, from each other, from your ancestors. And as you breathe out, imagine you are releasing that power into this space.

I want you to feel your power.

I want you to feel our power together.
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** We Pray Freedom Launch Event
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You’re invited to join Freedom Church of the Poor for their virtual launch event for We Pray Freedom: Liturgies and Rituals from the Freedom Church of the Poor. The event will follow the six chapters of the book and feature many of its contributors. Join us for a powerful evening of healing, remembrance, and celebration of taking action together.

DC friends, save the date for our in-person launch event on October 10th.
Learn more & register! ([link removed])

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** Screen Severed
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3pm ET, October 5th, in recognition of two years of relentless genocide in Gaza, as well as National Disability Awareness Month in the U.S., Donkeysaddle Projects ([link removed]) , New Disabled South ([link removed]) , and Adalah Justice Project ([link removed]) invite you to engage your communities through film, discussion, and action. At the heart of this campaign is Severed (2025), a powerful new short documentary that follows Mohamad Saleh, a teenager from Gaza who lost his leg at 12 and survived five Israeli military assaults. In those attacks, he lost his home, close family members, and best friends. His story is both deeply personal and emblematic of the thousands of Palestinians disabled by Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Register ([link removed])
Host your own screening ([link removed])

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