The Fredericton Anti-Poverty Organization (FAPO) has been providing material support, services, and advocacy to low-income people since 1983. The New Brunswick Media Co-op sat down with FAPO’s co-ordinator, Dan Weston, to find out more about the group’s operations.
AM: What does FAPO do?
DW: FAPO is a peoples’ organization and we exist to help people maintain their standard of living as best as possible. We have people who will speak publicly whenever asked, we organize community forums, we’re on the news all the time, and we try to organize low-income people but to try to tell people things is very difficult when they can’t hear the words so we have in a sense, an organization lying in waiting. Waiting for an economic situation to motivate people somewhat en mass and then maybe we can be of some help. At this particular time we have been helping people to maintain their living situation. It may seem like a contradiction in a sense that we would be waiting for an economic situation that would motivate the people politically en mass and at the same time try to help them out day-to-day to maintain themselves but we don’t see it as a contradiction because what we do is very small in the grand scheme of things, yet we can help people out day-to-day because things aren’t going to change right now. People have to deal with the situation that they’re faced with. So we try to help people out with that, not only materially, through these stores but we’ll help you struggle against the bureaucracy. We have fought and lost quite a few human rights situations and we help people in custody and those kinds of things. So we try to keep active and at the same time to be a peoples’ organization, that’s there for people and to struggle for them.
AM: How was FAPO formed?
DW: FAPO was formed on the night of March the 20th in 1983 by 54 poor people and we’ve been in existence ever since.
AM: What did you decide to do as FAPO?
DW: In those days our constitution, which we still try to adhere to, was to fight poverty, especially planned poverty in all its forms. And what we mean by planned poverty is that poverty is necessary for the functioning of the system.
AM: I heard that FAPO came out of a branch of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is that true?
DW: Some of the members of the committee that organized FAPO were former students from Students for a Democratic Society although here in New Brunswick we called it Struggle for a Democratic Society.
AM: How does FAPO use its stores to help people living in poverty?
DW: Well, the stores help people to access goods cheaper then they can get anywhere else and have much larger selection than would normally be available in this community. We also have a warehouse where we try to sell things cheaper, encouraging people to price things themselves, within reason. And then if you can’t afford that we will put you in a giveaway book and try to give things to you as we can however you can’t shop with people who have to pay, you have to trust us to bring you decent stuff. We’ve been around for I think 28 years and we’re here to help people out. You can’t go to Value Village if you need fifty bucks for a bus ticket or for medication but you can come and ask us. We get referred by welfare workers constantly. We get all sorts of referrals from the Salvation Army and other organizations for people who need things and need money to come to us. We don’t ask for money. We don’t even ask for (donated goods), but they have been coming in on their own accord for over 25 years so why not make us of them? We haven’t done it in such a way as to make any kind of profit. We have only tried to sustain ourselves. Whatever money we get from doing this, we file it back into the organization and we try to organize with that.
AM: The stores also seem to function as a recycling program. Do you think that your operations divert a lot of waste?
DW: That is quite correct. We have between 6-8 thousand Fredericton families that donate to us each year. We do this without advertising of any kind. It’s all word of mouth. If we did advertise, we would just get way more stuff than we could handle. So we recycle a lot of things and prevent them from going to the landfill, things that are still useful, things that people would not normally be able to access except through buy and sell situations, individually speaking, but what we have done is made a mass thing out of it. You can view it as what it is, a natural recycling and something that can be expanded on that really keeps a lot of stuff from the landfill and at the same time helps out a lot of low-income people. So, we figure we are integral to the way that things work in this community.
AM: Do you think that people appreciate the opportunity to buy second hand?
DW: If you use us as a barometer of what people need and don’t need our sales are not high enough in this community for me to say that people really need to use second-hand goods that much. Still people are going to places like Liquidation World and Rent-to-Own to try and buy new furniture and try to pay for it. We get a number of people who have gone that route, the rent-to-own route, and end up paying huge amounts of money and can’t keep up with the payments and end up saying “why didn’t we shop here in the first place?” So, if you don’t mind having second-hand furniture that is usually well under $100, then this is the best place to shop.
AM: Do you have a lot of students shopping, trying to set up house around this time of year?
DW: Yeah well, a lot of students don’t know about us. We are, by word of mouth, known more on the north side than on the south side of Fredericton.
AM: I noticed the FAPO volunteer hall of fame on your website. How many volunteers do you have?
DW: At the moment we use volunteers for specific things but our workers are the ones that keep everything going in the stores because we have to live by the demands put on us by this donation process and volunteers could never handle that because volunteers can only work on their own time. We need to have people that work on the time that we have to have people there for. So we pay people the cash that we need to. Those same people also do volunteer things for us. We also have people that volunteer to come in to straighten things up, to clean, and that kind of thing, we have a board of directors that are volunteers and we use volunteer people when we are organizing events so its quite a lot of volunteers.
AM: Why do you think FAPO attracts so many volunteers?
DW: Well, I don’t know. Maybe its what we do, because there is a very visible way in which you can help out and find something to do, because we have to deal with all of this stuff that comes in. Second, in the grand scheme of this organization, we are here trying to help people. Number three, I think that it provides a non-stressful situation in which you can help people out. We are basically on the left of the political spectrum and maybe that also helps to attract a certain range of volunteers. There’s other things that we would like to get to do. We would like to be able to use our website more than what we are but we don’t have people who will volunteer enough on that level to help us out at the moment. But that’s a situation that we hope to be able to remedy sometime in the future. We can maybe, encourage students to help us out on the website, to research the poverty situation and to write things for our website. That kind of thing would be really nice. So that’s maybe something in the future that interested students might want to do with us.
AM: What are FAPO’s plans for the future?
DW: There has been some talk about running candidates in the upcoming municipal election and we are interested in seeing if there can be some kind of anti-poverty, pro-environment alliance platform that could be presented. We think that meetings can be held shortly to begin to organize this. There are other people in the voluntary sector who are not happy with the way that things are running in this community and they would be interested in running as well. There are quite a number of people so I think we could cover enough wards and form a bit of an alliance. Then, the people who have control of the city would think that its not such an easy ride as it has been so far, that maybe there is some opposition. We could show the electorate that there is another way to go with the city than the present way with golden miles, and turning all that grassland, perhaps vegetable land into housing developments and the same old thing. We would also be interested in more democracy within the ward system itself so that people who run for council have gone through a bit of a political education with neighbourhood and tenants associations. We would be interested in talking about that as well.
FAPO operates three second-hand stores on the north side of Fredericton, the Yard Sale Store at 242 Gibson street and the Furniture Centre and U-Price Warehouse on Canada street in Marysville.
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