To Whom It May Concern,
For the last year your multi-million dollar corporation, while presenting itself as a progressive non-profit to help poor people with housing, has been leaning on the New River Tenants Union to subsidize the costs of tenants moving from one CHP rental unit to another. Our organization is entirely volunteer-based. In fact we pay to fund our organization ourselves and receive no grants or philanthropy to do the work we do. We do so out of a strong commitment of solidarity between working families and the belief housing is a right for everyone, not something to profit off of.
New River Tenants Union comes nowhere close to accessing that cash flow to fund our efforts. We have no paid staff. We do not own a moving truck. We self fund The People’s Mover at around $150 bucks a move: renting a moving truck with insurance, buying gas, and providing free labor to move tenants. While it may look like chump change to CHP bureaucrats, this is a huge effort on our part to maintain the program. We are not here to subsidize costs for CHP, when it can afford to fund such a program itself.
Therefore we demand you cease using the New River Tenants Union as an exploitable resource and instead pay the union to run The People’s Mover program. Your organization has been the primary benefactor of our program. We are not a charity, especially for a multi-million dollar landlord operation that has a history of harm towards working class tenants. Either fund our program and pay our volunteers for their labor or stop exploiting us as tenants. You already suck our blood with rent every month as it is; you don’t need any more money or free labor to continue your operations.
Sincerely,
– CHP tenants and the New River Tenants Union
